Close-up of a blue floral tattoo with two large flowers, leaves and small dots, placed on the inner forearm of a person wearing a white lace top.

Blue floral tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two stylised flowers stacked vertically, with rounded petals, dark centres, leaves and small scattered dots. The linework is soft and painterly, with blue wash-like shading inside the petals and leaves. The single blue ink stands out against pale skin, and the plain light background keeps the focus on the arm.

Botanical Forearm Flower Leaf Dot Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Jannetje had been painting the same two flowers for eleven years, and the widow at the end of Vlamingstraat still sent back every tile that wasn't right. "The petals lean like they're tired," she had written in her spidery hand. "Paint them as if the wind has got into them." So Jannetje dipped her finest brush in the cobalt she ground herself from the oxide that came up the canal in a barrel each spring, and she tried again.

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The tiles were for a garden wall, forty of them, to be set in a row beside the pear tree. Her master had told her to keep the brushwork loose, because the kiln would soften every edge anyway, and a wash that bled into the glaze was worth more than a line drawn with a ruler. She found the dots were the hardest part. Each one had to be placed without thinking, the way a sparrow lands, and every time she thought about them they came out like spilt ink.

On the last afternoon before firing, the widow came herself, leaning on a stick, and walked the row slowly with her fingertips held above the glaze, not quite touching. She stopped at the fourth tile from the end, where two blooms were stacked one above the other and the leaves seemed to tip toward each other as if they had heard something. "There," she said. "That one is the wind." She paid in coins warm from her apron pocket, and Jannetje went home with blue staining the creases of her fingers for a week.