Close-up of a blue botanical flower tattoo with leaves on the inner wrist and forearm of a person wearing a gold ring.

Blue floral tattoo on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stylised blue flower with layered petals and a dark centre sits above a small spray of leaves and tendrils on the inner wrist. The linework is bold and the petals are filled with several tones of blue, giving a painted, Delft-like look. The tattoo is the only colour in an otherwise neutral image of a white top, dark jeans and a hand resting at the hip.

Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Floral Tendril Spray

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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

Pieter had been told the cobalt was too dear for a boy to waste, so he mixed it thin on the back of a saucer and practised on the bottoms of broken bowls. The kiln on Texel stood behind the salt sheds, and the wind off the North Sea was so hard that the glaze cracked if the door was left open a breath too long. His master, Joost, measured everything with a bent wire. Pieter's first flowers came out lopsided, petals like thumbprints, and Joost turned each one over and dropped it into the bucket for grinding.

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Then the autumn ships came in late, their holds full of Chinese porcelain no trader could sell, and the harbour master ordered a crate of tiles for the church wall. Joost fell ill with lungs that wheezed like the bellows. Pieter had to finish the order alone. He painted the same flower forty times: five layered petals, a dark seed at the heart, two heavy leaves curling down like a hand closing around something. By the thirtieth he stopped counting strokes and let his wrist do what it had learned from watching.

The last tile he kept back. He did not sign it. He carried it up the dune path wrapped in a sack, past the lighthouse, and set it in the sand where the spring tide would reach. When Joost recovered and asked where it had gone, Pieter only said that the sea had asked for it, and that the sea had good taste.