Blue watercolour-style flower tattoo with soft petal washes and darker centre strokes on the inside of a wrist, shown beside a painted version on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue watercolour-style flower on wrist

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

A soft-edged blue flower with loose petal shapes and darker blue strokes through the centre, with a few speckled dots above. The tattoo uses blended shading and light washes rather than hard outlines, and it sits on the inside of a pale wrist. A painted version of the same flower lies on textured white paper to the left against a light fabric background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas,

Keep reading

The snow has sealed the valley road since Tuesday, so the carrier will not come until the thaw, and the innkeeper's wife has given me the back room with the good north light. I have been painting the blue flower you sent me the seed of, the one that never opened for you in the greenhouse. Here it opens every morning on the sill, as if it had only been waiting for somewhere cold enough.

Most of my washes go wrong. I wet the paper too early and the pigment runs into the margin like ink in milk, and I have learned to leave it there. The best petals came when I stopped correcting them. Where the water pooled I let the blue bloom out into pale edges, then dropped the darker ultramarine into the throat of the flower with a rigger brush, three quick strokes, before the paper could think about it. Mrs Haddow downstairs says it looks like a bruise. I told her bruises do not usually have stamens.

Yesterday the sun came out for an hour and the snow on the ledge turned the colour of my rinse water. I went out with the sketchbook and found myself painting the flower's shadow on the sill instead of the flower itself. It was bluer than anything on my palette. I have pinned that sheet beside the other, and I think it is the first honest thing I have made since the autumn.

Enclosed is a small one I painted for you, the first to come out right. Do not frame it. Let it fade wherever it wants to.

Yours, Nell

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