Botanical tattoo on a shoulder and upper arm, showing pale peach wild roses with green leaves, dark ferns, succulent-style blooms and small red berries, in a neo-traditional style.

Wild roses and ferns on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with two large peach-toned wild roses, each with a dark outline and a yellow-centred bloom. Green leaves, dark fern fronds, a grey-green succulent-style flower and small red berries fill the gaps around the roses, forming a curved arrangement. The linework is bold and the shading is soft, with muted greens and warm pinks as the main colours.

Botanical Neo-trad Shoulder Upper arm Rose Flower Fern Leaf Berry Succulent 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

You reach the gate just as the wind turns, and the lamp has already gone dark behind its glass. Your father stands at the foot of the tower with his palm flat against the stone, the way he checks a horse's neck, and he doesn't look up. "Wick's fouled," he says. "Take the can and the cloth. Mind the ferns on the stair."

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Ferns grow in the joints of the masonry all the way up, black-stemmed and feathery, and the succulent on the gallery rail has come into flower in the salt air. The wild roses under the wall have dropped their petals onto the gravel and set hips the colour of boiled sweets. You have always thought them stubborn things, rooted in a crack in the rock and still throwing out blooms every June, whatever the gale does.

At the top, the lens is hazed with salt and the brass is greening at the seams. You work the cloth in small circles until your knuckles sting, and you think about the smack that went onto the Skerry the winter before you were born, and how nobody on the mainland ever writes back about a light that simply works. Out past the gap, a boat with sails the colour of old bone turns toward the lamp, exactly as you want it to.

You strike the match and feel the wick take. The beam swings out across the water like a breath let go. Your father will say nothing about the time it took. He will put the kettle on and leave the window cracked so you can hear the sea.