Black fine line tattoo of wild roses, a bud and leaves on the upper arm of a person wearing a dark top.

Wild rose and bud on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two open wild roses with a closed bud and several serrated leaves, drawn as a single outline with the petals and leaves left as open shapes. Fine, even linework is used throughout, with small stippled dots at the centre of the main flower. The design is entirely black ink on pale skin, against a plain light wall, and it spreads diagonally across the upper arm.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Rose Flower Bud Leaves Foliage

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the lamp only carries so far. The rose came up through the boards of Dunmore's Gallopers the winter the old grey horse went to the knacker, and nobody in the showmen's yard had the heart to pull it. Nell Harrow watered it from the tin cup she used for her tea. She said a thing that would grow out of a dead horse's stall was owed a bit of respect. By June it had climbed the caravan step, and by July it had two blooms open, wide and pale as saucers of milk, with a drift of dark dots at the heart where the bees went in and came out dusted gold.

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The fair moved on that summer, the way it always does, from Ely to Wisbech to a gravel car park outside Lowestoft. Every time they struck the tents the rose came along, rolled in sacking in the back of the lorry, and every time they pitched it grew another leaf and another thorn. Nell's boy Tom had gone to sea in April and not written. The rose kept one bud closed all season, tight as a fist, and she would not say why.

Well. You know what that bud is, if you have ever kept a rose through a hard winter. The plant holds one back. Whatever the frost takes, the closed one waits in the hedge until somebody comes down the lane asking after them. Tom came up the road on the last night of the Michaelmas fair with his kitbag and salt still in his hair, and the bud opened while he stood at the gate, and nobody needed telling anything after that.