Circular blue floral tattoo with peonies and scrolling leaves on the upper arm of a person in a white vest top.

Blue floral medallion on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A round medallion of peony-style flowers, leaves and scrolling foliage sits on the outer upper arm. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading in several tones of blue ink that give the blooms depth. The tattoo is framed against a pale wall, with the subject's forearm resting across the body and the face out of shot.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Peony Leaves Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta had painted the same round tile eleven times, and the cobalt would not sit. Thinned with linseed it turned grey at the edges, so she worked with the shutter open to the birches at the edge of Volkov wood, hoping the cold would steady her wrist. The bakery stove below was hers to finish before the first frost, and the baker had asked for something that would make people stop at his door.

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Her grandmother had taught her the peony years ago, pressed flat in the back of a psalter, its petals curled like the shells of snails. Marta had never got the shading right on the outer petal. Each time she loaded the brush she heard the old woman say light from the middle out, always from the middle out, so on the twelfth morning she started again at the centre, dabbing white ground until the bloom rose through it. Then the leaves, then the scrolls, stems looping round the rim like a ribbon that had decided never to end.

By afternoon the baker's boy came up the hill with a message. A forester had found a fox in the snowline, and the village wanted to know whether the stove would be lit for the funeral supper or the tiles left bare. Marta sent back a single word, not yet, and went on with the second shade, a deeper blue she mixed from the last of the pedlar's powder.

When the tile was fired and set in the wall it looked like nothing much from across the square. But the baker's wife came early on Sunday, and the sun through the glass lit the medallion so the blooms seemed to open as she passed. She stood a long time with her hand on the warm tile. Marta, watching from the doorway, saw that her own fingers were blue to the second knuckle, and left them that way.