Two forearms with blue watercolour-style flower tattoos, a larger cluster on the left arm and a single small flower on the right, both on the forearm.

Blue watercolour flowers on two forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The left forearm shows a loose cluster of blue five-petalled flowers with dark ink splatters and a pale green and yellow wash running across the skin. The right forearm has a single smaller blue flower with a yellow centre and a faint green wash beneath it. The petals are shaded with soft gradients rather than hard outlines, and the background is a blue jumper and striped fabric.

Botanical Forearm Flower Blue flower Petal Ink splatter

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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

By the third week of March the dye-house above the Calder smelled of wet wool and vinegar, and Ada Pryce had three jars of unsold indigo lined up on the sill like promises nobody had come to collect.

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Mrs Tully arrived on a Thursday with her daughter's christening lace, which had gone the colour of weak tea in a cupboard, and asked for it back blue. Ada took the cloth to the vat, lifted it, and her elbow caught the nearest jar. The indigo went across the lace in one dark bloom, shaped rather like a thumbprint on a window. Mrs Tully opened her mouth. Ada, who had never once in her life been quick with an apology, took up a sable brush instead, dipped it in the spilt blue and began painting forget-me-nots over the stain. Five petals each, the washes loose enough to run, a dab of old gold at every centre where the wet had pooled.

Mrs Tully demanded her money back. Then she held the cloth to the window and was quiet for long enough that the kettle started up in the back room. "It looks as if it grew there," she said, and paid the full price.

The daughter was christened in it that April, and by the summer half the village had brought Ada their spoilt linen, hoping for the same accident. She never spilt again on purpose. In a drawer under the till she kept the first handkerchief, now soft as a moth's wing, and if you held it to the lamp you could still find the splash beneath the flowers, a dark patch of sky the petals had decided to forgive.