Photograph of a crouching person in jeans and brown boots, with a colourful tattoo running down the forearm and upper arm on the left side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Arm tattoo on a crouching man in jeans

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A person crouches on a pale grey surface, wearing a white t-shirt, dark blue jeans with turned-up cuffs, a brown belt and brown leather boots. The left arm is tattooed from the upper arm to the forearm, with dark shading and areas of red and orange ink that appear to form floral or foliage shapes. The framing is a tight crop of the body, with the tattoo as a prominent detail against the light background.

Upper arm Forearm Floral Leaves Red flower

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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

The lift in Harcourt House has been broken since March, so you carry the bags up fourteen floors and reach the door with your lungs burning. Mrs Okafor from flat 14C has left a note taped to the bin store: the geranium on her balcony has gone leggy, and would you take cuttings before the council men come to clear the ledges. You have never grown anything but mould in a bathroom.

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The balcony is a concrete shelf the width of a bus seat, and the plants have wandered over the railing as if they are looking for the ground. You snip stems with her kitchen scissors and stand them in jam jars of tap water along the sill. Below, the estate hums: a radio, a child calling one name over and over, pigeons arguing on the bins. The red blooms are the only colour for three blocks in every direction, darker orange at the throat, and you hold one up to the light the way she showed you, checking it is not dying.

When the council man arrives he knocks on the wrong door first, then yours, and asks what you think you're doing with all that foliage. You tell him you're keeping it alive for someone who taught you the difference between a cutting and a weed. He looks at the jars, then at the sky over the tower, and says nothing about the ledge.

Three weeks later she comes back from the hospital with a stick and a paper bag of oranges. She stands at her open door and counts the jars, eleven roots in all. She touches one leaf and nods, the way you would at a student who has passed. Then she puts the kettle on, and you carry the jars through one at a time, up the last flight of stairs, because the lift still doesn't work.