Colour tattoo of pink, purple and red flowers with green leaves on a shoulder and upper arm, with a knitted or embroidered texture.

Colourful flowers across shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a pink peony-like bloom with a yellow centre, a purple rose, a large red flower with an orange centre, and green leaves with lilac bell-shaped flowers above. Each petal and leaf is shaded with fine stitch-like texture lines that give a woven, embroidered look. The flowers wrap from the top of the shoulder down the upper arm, with bright, saturated colour across the whole design.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Peony Rose Leaves

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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

Come closer, you lot at the back, and mind the rope. I'll tell you about Mags Tolliver, who ran the needle stall at Hollin Fair the summer the big wheel stuck with a man in the top car. She sat under a striped awning with a tin of silks and a stool that wobbled, and she stitched flowers onto anything folk brought her: flour sacks, bonnet brims, the cuffs of lads going off to the coast.

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One wet August a boy came up the hill with a torn coat and a question. His mother had gone to the sea for work and not written since Lent. He wanted a rose on the cuff, purple as bruised plums, so she'd know him if she ever came back up the lane. Mags said roses were easy enough to stitch and hard to keep, so she worked the petals in small raised knots, one thread at a time, until the purple looked pressed in a book.

Then she sewed a red star-flower beside it, with an orange heart wound round like a snail's shell, and a peony full of pink ruffles with a yellow crown of stamens. Bell-shaped lilac blooms hung from green stalks above, and every leaf got its own grain of stitch, so the whole sleeve looked woven rather than painted.

The boy went down to the coast wearing it. Mags never learned whether the mother came back up the lane. But the purple rose is still in her tin, the one she unpicked from a spare cuff to test her thread. It's as bright today as the morning she finished it, and if you ask nicely, she'll let you hold it.