Blue ornamental flower tattoo with scrolling leaves on the inside of a wrist, worn with a denim shirt and dark jeans.

Blue floral ornament on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large, rounded flower with layered petals sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by curling scrolls and leafy shapes. The linework is fine and the shading uses soft gradations of blue and teal, giving a slightly faded, dimensional look. The design is centred on the inner wrist, with a brown belt and dark denim visible behind it.

Botanical Forearm Flower Peony Scroll Leaves Ornament

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the urn, because the next train isn't due for forty minutes and I've only one story left in me tonight. You see that panel above the ticket hatch, the blue flower with its curling leaves? Somebody cut it out of a wall in Ashcombe before they pulled the old potteries down, and they carried it here on a flatbed, wrapped in sacking, the way you'd carry a sleeping child.

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The woman who painted it was called Nell Harrow, and she worked the kilns for thirty years, drawing the same peony over and over on plates nobody ever bought. Her husband Tom had lost his hearing in the pits and could only read her face, so she painted the flowers larger than they needed to be, so he could make them out from the far end of the kitchen. Every petal was a sentence she never got to say aloud.

When the works closed in the winter of the great frost, the foreman called the tiles scrap and told Nell to clear her bench. She said nothing. That night she climbed the wall with a bucket of cold tea and a sponge, and she softened every petal with her thumb until the flower looked less like something made and more like something remembered. Dead flowers, the foreman called them, and he was half right.

When the wrecking crew came, my dad Ivo stood in the road in his good coat and wouldn't let them drop it. He paid the foreman's nephew a pint and a promise. So here it hangs, over the hatch where the tea is sold. Drink up and mind the step. When the last lamp goes low tonight, look up at the blue, and if you're patient you'll see Nell's face in the petals.