Black and grey botanical tattoo of a wild rose branch with shaded petals and a thorny stem on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wild rose branch on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sprig of wild rose with three open flowers, several buds and a thorny stem curves across the outer forearm. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading and stippled texture on the petals and leaves. The design is set against a plain skin tone and a red brick wall in the background.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Bud Leaves Thorn Branch

Find an artist for this

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

The inspector held the cutting up to the strip light the way you would hold a dead moth, by the very end of its stem, and the thorns caught the glow like little hooks. 'Hedgerow stock,' he read off the crate tag. 'Unlisted. The manifest says this ring carries no living rose.'

Keep reading

I told him the truth, which was that the crate had come up from the old seed vault in the spine, where the wardens still counted bulbs by hand. Someone had packed it in wet moss and a sealed tin, labelled in a hand I didn't know. Three open flowers, pale as skimmed milk, and buds still shut tight as fists. I had carried it up four decks against my ribs like a stolen letter.

Corran wanted it binned for the compost stream. I asked him for one hour before the recyclers ran. He said the ring had no use for hours, only for protein yield and cycle logs. So I took the sprig down to the lower garden, where the grow-lamps still burned amber, and I shaved a sliver of bark from the stem and pressed it into the split flesh of a dog-rose rootstock we'd been keeping alive in a pot, binding the join with the tin's old wax paper.

Nine days later the bud on the left opened while I was logging yields. I didn't tell Corran. I left the bloom where it was on the garden bench, and when the lamps dimmed for night I could see its petals holding the last of the amber, pale as the paper it had come wrapped in.