Colourful botanical bouquet of dahlias, asters and nasturtiums across a person's forearm, shown beside a white lace top.

Botanical flower bouquet on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of flowers fills the forearm, including a pink bloom, a red dahlia, a blue aster, orange and red nasturtiums, a purple sweet pea and a dark red poppy, with green leaves and stems. The petals are rendered in soft, detailed shading that resembles a vintage botanical print. The colours are rich and varied against plain pale skin, with the design cropped at the edge of the arm.

Botanical Forearm Flower Bouquet Dahlia Poppy Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis wanted the dahlia redone before the printer would touch the plate. "It looks like a cabbage that has seen a ghost," she said, tapping the proof with a gloved finger, and Ada Penrose, who had painted flowers for the Carrow and Sons catalogue since she was nineteen, did not argue. She took the proof home on the omnibus and laid it on the kitchen table beside the jar of brushes and a saucer of cold tea.

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The trouble was not the dahlia. The trouble was that every bloom in the bouquet had been drawn from a different summer. The pink chrysanthemum came from a garden in Chelsea, the blue aster from a window box in Kentish Town, and the nasturtiums from her brother Tom's allotment, which he had sworn would feed the family and had instead fed the slugs. Put together, they looked like a party where nobody had been introduced.

She worked until the lamp guttered, mixing a red so dark it was nearly purple to lay under the poppy's black heart. Tom came in at midnight with mud to his knees and stood behind her chair without speaking. He studied the sheet for a long time, then pointed with a dirty thumb at the edge of the paper, where she had let the sweet pea spill past the border.

"Leave that bit off the page," he said. "Let it run out. It looks like it's still growing."

She did. The printer grumbled, the plate was cut, and the catalogue went out in March with the flowers pressing hard against the edge, as though someone had cut the bouquet from a larger garden and kept only what would fit.