Black and grey full sleeve tattoo on an arm, showing a woman's face with flowing hair beside floral and swirling motifs, extending from the shoulder to the forearm.

Woman portrait and floral full sleeve

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo shows a woman's face in profile with flowing, wavy hair, set among flowers, leaves and scrolling linework. A dark swirl with leaf-like shapes sits high on the shoulder, and scale-like patterns appear lower on the forearm. The work is rendered in fine shading and detailed linework across the whole sleeve, which is photographed against a white vest and a grey background.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Woman Portrait Flower Leaves Swirl Scale

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 snow has shut the pass by the time you reach the Lantern at Harrow Dale, and the landlady, Mrs Eiry, takes your wet coat without asking your name. Upstairs the passage smells of tallow and damp wool. Your room has a single window and a wardrobe painted with a woman in profile, her hair lifting in a wind that never reaches the bed. Above her head a black whirl of cloud turns slowly, the way a drain turns before it takes the last of the water.

Keep reading

At supper the cook tells you her name was Sabine, and that the wardrobe was painted by the innkeeper's grandfather the winter he was courting a bargeman's daughter who went into the mill race in the thaw. Nobody liked to move the wardrobe after that. The cook says it with a shrug, cutting bread, and says the scales painted low on the panel are meant to be river fish, and the lilies were drawn for her funeral.

That night the wind drops and the room goes so quiet you can hear the varnish tick as it cools. Your lamp catches the lower panel. The scales there have been rubbed pale, worn smooth in a neat arc at the height of a hand, as though someone has pressed palm and fingers to the wood every winter for a hundred years and never once been allowed to finish.

In the morning you fetch a rag and a pot of linseed from the stable. You work the grime from her cheek while the house sleeps, and when the sun comes up over the drifts the painted woman has turned her head a fraction, and her eyes, which were lowered when you arrived, are looking at the door.