Close view of a blue-grey botanical tattoo of roses and leaves running from the wrist up the inner forearm, in a shaded folk-inspired style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue floral tattoo on the forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cluster of large roses or peonies with smaller buds and leaves runs from the wrist up the inner forearm. The linework is soft and the petals are filled with layered shading in slate blue and grey ink. The arm is held forward against a plain grey background, with a thin silver bracelet on the wrist and the hand relaxed in the lower frame.

Botanical Forearm Rose Peony Flower Leaves Bud

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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

The cobalt comes to the galley in a twist of paper that smells of vinegar, and Hendrik tells you on your first day not to lick your thumb after touching it. You are the cook's boy on the fluyt, eleven weeks out of Texel, and your work is flour, salt pork and scrubbing pewter. Hendrik's work is the blue. He grinds it with gum and water on a slab of marble wrapped in sailcloth, and when the captain's last set of plates arrives blank from Delft, he gives you a brush and a bread board to practise on.

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Shade from the centre out, he says. Let the petals darken where the light would not reach them, and leave a little white where it would. You fill a peony the size of a cabbage on the board, then another, then a sprig of buds that look more like drowned thumbs. By the Cape the board is more blue than wood. Hendrik says that is how you know you are learning.

The storm comes off the Agulhas bank on a Tuesday. A rack slides, the plate you have been working on drops to the deck, and it splits clean across a rose. Hendrik picks up both halves and studies them a long time. He does not scold. He says a crack is only a line that needs a petal, and he hands you the brush.

At Batavia the captain sells the blank plates for a fair price. The cook takes you to the wall above the stove, where years of soot have turned the plaster the colour of stewed tea, and asks what you intend to paint there. You dip the brush in the last of the cobalt, and by the time the bells ring for the watch you have a single bud on the wall, slate-blue and shaded, the first thing anyone sees when they reach for the pot.