Full arm sleeve of painterly colour flowers, with a purple and orange tulip on the upper arm, a blue bloom mid arm and a pink dahlia on the forearm.

Colourful floral sleeve on an arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve covers the arm from shoulder to wrist, filled with large flowers. A purple, pink and orange tulip sits on the upper arm, a blue bloom with an orange bud sits mid arm, and a pink and purple dahlia sits near the wrist. The shading is soft and detailed on a black background, with bright colour dominating the composition.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Forearm Flower Tulip Dahlia Sleeve Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Haarlem believed my father when he swore the striped tulip was a sport, a freak that had jumped its colour in one spring and come up in flame. He sold it anyway, twelve guilders the bulb, to a merchant from Leiden who wanted to be seen holding something rare. The man carried it home in a leather satchel wrapped in damp moss, and by June the petals had split into ribbons of violet and fire, edged in orange like a hem caught too close to the stove.

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The blue bloom came from my mother's back garden, which she would not let anyone dig. She had grown a dahlia from seed a sailor brought back from across the water, and it sulked for two summers before it opened the colour of a tidal pool at dusk. Beside it she kept a single orange bud, a closed fist that never quite decided. "Give it a week," she told the neighbours every morning, and every morning it held its breath.

The merchant came back in autumn, red in the face, saying the bulb had given him nothing but leaves. My father took his spade out to the bed by the canal without a word. Mother stood at the gate with her arms folded, daring him to touch the dahlias. They dug for an hour and found only clay, until my father struck something pale and hard and lifted it up to the light.

It was a tulip bulb, split down its middle and already streaked with a thin line of purple. "It moved house," my father said, and laughed until the merchant left without his guilders.