Black and grey botanical tattoo of large flowers and scrolling foliage across the shoulder and upper arm of a woman in a white vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey flowers and scrollwork on upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows large open flowers with petals and curling scrolled foliage that run from the shoulder down the outside of the upper arm. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading that gives the petals depth and volume. The image is in black and grey with no colour ink, and the framing cuts off the face so the arm and shoulder fill the frame against a red brick wall.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Floral Scrollwork Petal Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every boat in Lowestoft that came in with its paint gone grey got sent to me before it went back out, and by March my brushes were worn to stubs from all the scrollwork. Old Harold Tench swore the gulls could read a transom, so the stern of the Marigold had to look right before she could cross the bar. I laid the black on first, a thin line that curled like a fern unrolling, then the big open blooms, their petals thinned with a rag so the light could get into them.

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The Marigold's skipper, a silent man called Ruddock, came to watch me on a Tuesday in April with his hands jammed in his oilskin pockets. He wanted the flowers grey, not gold, because the fleet had no money for leaf and he said grey looked more like the weather they fished in. I told him grey was a lie about a flower. He said everything on a boat was a lie that kept you alive, and went off to check his nets.

The Marigold didn't come back the next spring. Her stern stayed on the quay with the last petals unfinished, and nobody asked me to finish them. On a Sunday I took a tin of black down to the slipway and painted the final bloom, shading it darker at the centre the way Ruddock liked his coffee. Then I sat on a bollard until the tide turned under the wall, and the gulls came down one by one to settle on the scrolls.