Botanical tattoo of a blue floral bouquet with a tulip, white flowers and leaves on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue floral bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of flowers on a stem, with a dark navy bloom, a white flower with a blue centre, a white tulip and a small teal flower. Thin black linework outlines the petals and stems, with solid blue fills and small blue and black accent marks. The bouquet sits diagonally on the forearm against plain skin and a white towel.

Botanical Forearm Flower Bouquet Tulip Leaves Stem Blue flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jug came to me in a shoebox lined with an old newspaper, wrapped in three tea towels, and the man who brought it said his mother had been very clear that it must be home by Friday. I turned it under the lamp. Someone long ago had painted a white tulip on the belly of it, then brushed the cobalt around the petals so carefully that the blue seemed to lift them off the glaze.

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The chip sat on the lip, a bite the size of a lentil. Filling it was easy. Matching the glaze was the trouble, because the white had yellowed over decades of Sunday gravy. I spent two evenings with a fine sable and a pot of tin glaze I'd mixed myself, adding a drop of cobalt at a time until the blue sat right, and each night I thought about the hand that had made the original.

On the Thursday, with the lamp pulled close, I found a mark under the foot in faint blue: a crooked M beside a sprig of something with three petals. Nobody signs a jug like that. I rang the son. He said his mother called it Auntie Mab's, and that Mab had worked at a pottery in Hull and painted the tulips on her dinner breaks, one at a time, for a shilling a piece.

I didn't fill the lip entirely. I left a fleck of the old glaze showing beside the new, a small honest gap, and painted a single teal flower next to the M, the way she might have. When the courier came on Friday, I wrapped the jug in the same tea towels and told myself it was finished, though I knew it wasn't, not quite.