Woman seen from behind with a blue botanical tattoo of a flower bouquet in Delft-style blue and white shading, placed between the shoulder blades on her upper back.

Blue Delft-style floral bouquet on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman with wavy blonde hair is seen from behind, wearing a white lace top. A blue floral bouquet tattoo sits between her shoulder blades, showing peony-like blooms, smaller flowers, buds and leaves. The linework is fine and the petals are shaded in tonal blues, giving a porcelain-like, Delft-inspired finish against her pale skin.

Botanical Back Flower Bouquet Peony Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had closed the pass for three days when the innkeeper's daughter carried the blue jug up to the room where the stranger slept. It was the good jug, the one with the peonies painted round its belly, and her mother had told her not to let it near the fire.

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The stranger was a potter from the lowlands, or so he said. He had come over the mountain with a satchel of brushes and a cracked plate wrapped in wool. Each evening he painted the same flower onto a scrap of tin while the stew cooled, a bloom with three petals folded like a cupped hand, and each morning he scraped it off and began again. Marta asked him why. He said the flower was not finished until the frost let go of the valley.

On the fourth night the cold came down so hard that the window glass grew ferns. Marta found the potter at the table with the jug in front of him, turning it slowly, and the peonies had gone a deeper blue, as though they had drunk the lamplight. He said the old potters used cobalt from the hills and that the colour remembered warmth. Then he set the jug down and asked her to fetch the rest of the bread.

When the pass opened in spring, the satchel was gone and so was the plate. On the table lay a single tin tile, painted with a bouquet of blue blooms and buds, and a note in small square letters: pay the frost, keep the jug. Marta never found out who the potter was. She kept the tile above the hearth, and every winter the peonies on the jug came up a shade bluer.