Close photograph of a blue botanical tattoo in a circular folk-style floral design on the upper arm of a woman wearing a white vest top.

Blue folk floral circle on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A circular cluster of peonies, rosebuds and leaves is tattooed on the upper arm. The flowers are shaded in several tones of blue with fine dark linework, and the outer leaves and buds are drawn in a painted, folk-art manner. The tattoo sits centrally against plain pale skin and a light background, with the woman's necklaces and vest top at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Peony Rose Flower Floral Leaves Bud Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Master Ilse Varrow had been painting the same circle of flowers for thirty years, and her hand had not yet learned to hurry. The cobalt came up from the mines at Sallen Ridge in wax-sealed tins, and she mixed it with linseed and a little river water until it sat the colour of a bruise just beginning to heal. Her apprentice, Tobin Carrow, thought the peonies looked like cabbages until she told him to stop staring at the flowers and look at the gaps between them.

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The king's steward arrived in the wet month of Harrowmere with an order for ninety dinner plates, each carrying the same wreath. Ilse refused. Plates were for eating off, she said, and a wreath that repeated itself was a lie told to tired eyes. The steward left with his jaw set, and for a week the workshop smelt of oil and quiet.

On the seventh night Tobin found her at the kiln with a single plate balanced on her knees. She had painted every flower slightly wrong: a rosebud leaning left where the others leaned right, a fleck of darker blue at the rim of each peony where a thumb would rest. "Nobody will count them," she said. "But somebody will feel them."

When the plate came out of the fire, Tobin turned it over and saw the cobalt had bled into the glaze exactly where she meant, pooling under the flowers like a small dark lake. He wrapped it in straw and carried it up to the palace himself. Nobody at the gate asked why it was the only plate in the crate that was not the same as the rest.