Blue botanical tattoo of roses and leaves on a woman's forearm, with a denim shirt sleeve rolled up and hydrangeas behind her.

Blue floral tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a woman's forearm and hand, with a cluster of blue roses and leaves tattooed on the forearm. The rose petals and foliage are drawn with fine outlines and soft tonal shading in a single shade of blue, resembling Delft-style painted porcelain. The subject is framed against a blurred background of pink and white hydrangeas, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Botanical Forearm Rose Flower Floral Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate came up from the ship's hold wrapped in sailcloth that smelled of tar and oranges. Mr Brandt, the steward, unrolled it on the galley table as if it were a sleeping child. Blue roses ran round the rim, painted by someone in Delft who had never seen a rose that wasn't on a tile. I was twelve, scrubbing copper pots at Rotterdam with my sleeves rolled to the elbow, and I had no business touching it.

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The cook, old Hendrik Vos, had carried the set aboard as his late wife's dowry and never once used it at sea. Every Sunday he set one plate on the shelf above the range, where the heat could not reach it. Ship's biscuit goes on tin, he told me. Roses go on the shelf. When I asked what roses were for on a ship, he said that was precisely the question, and a boy who could not answer it should peel potatoes.

In the third week out, past the Azores, a long swell lifted the stern and the shelf came away from its bracket. The plates went in a clatter across the deck. Hendrik caught the blue one before it reached the grate, but it struck the rail on the way down and split clean across one bloom. He knelt there in the slop of cold tea and wouldn't let me sweep. He fitted the two halves together with a dab of tallow and set it back where it had always been.

I cook on a coaster now, and I still keep one plate on a shelf above the range. The crack runs under a rose, and I turn that side to the wall, where nobody has to ask why it's there.