Colour neo-traditional flower tattoo with blue, teal and yellow petals and green leaves on an upper arm, with a black tattoo above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and teal flower on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large flower with layered blue and teal petals, yellow centre accents and green leaves sits on the inner upper arm of a person whose arm is bent. Bold black outlines define the petals and shading, and a separate dark tattoo with a swooping black shape is visible higher on the same arm. The photograph is a close selfie-style shot cropped below the face, with a grey top and tiled wall behind.

Neo-trad Upper arm Flower Petal Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The woad had to be cut before the first frost, and Brother Aldous had never once let me cut it alone. He stood in the vat house doorway with his sleeves rolled to the elbow, already blue to the wrist, and watched me grip the leaves the wrong way.

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Behind the infirmary the garden ran down to the river in terraces, and every bed had its work. Weld for the yellow, madder for the red the bishop's robes required, and the woad, which the older brothers said smelled of rain and rot. The vats sat in the cold of the undercroft. You lowered the cloth in green, drew it up, and watched it turn blue where it met the air, like something waking.

The winter the abbey's tithe failed, Aldous sent me to the tanner's widow at Thorne with forty yards of linen and a letter he would not let me read. She sent back a bolt dyed the colour of deep water, with weld gold pressed into its centre, and a note in a shaking hand: tell him the petals hold. I did not understand until he unfolded it on the bench and went very still.

He told me then that he had dyed her husband's shroud forty years before, when the blue came out wrong and he was too proud to begin again. She had kept it folded in a chest all that time. We never spoke of it afterwards. But each spring he sowed the woad in rows so straight you could sight along them, and he would rub a crushed leaf into my knuckles and say nothing at all.