Full colour paisley and mandala floral sleeve covering the shoulder and upper arm.

Colourful paisley and floral sleeve

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve covers the shoulder and upper arm with paisley motifs, layered flower heads and mandala-style patterns. The linework is bold and dark, and the fills use saturated pinks, reds, purples, teal, yellow and orange with some shading in the petals and paisley curves. The design fills the frame edge to edge, and the wearer's black vest top is visible at the left.

Shoulder Upper arm Paisley Mandala Flower Floral Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed merchant would not sell Oda the red poppies unless she brought him three bolts of cloth dyed the colour of a bruised plum, and she had none. So she went down to the river where the madder grew wild and the water ran blue with woad, and she sat on the flat stones until the sun was low.

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Her grandmother had told her that a garden keeps what you give it. Oda gave it her stitching, the nights of threading indigo and rust into the hem of every shawl in the village, and when the frost came she gave it her last clean linen. The paisley seeds she had saved in a twist of paper curled like teardrops, each one turning its tail toward the morning light. She pressed them into the black soil by the wall and sang the old counting song, one, two, three, the way her mother used to.

By midsummer the bed had risen into a crowd of flower heads, red as cut cherries, purple at the heart, with teal leaves curling round them like the edges of a letter folded twice. The seed merchant came to the gate himself. He looked at the blooms for a long time, then at her hands, stained to the wrist.

"You never brought the cloth," he said.

"I didn't need to," Oda said. "The ground took my threads and gave back better colour."

He took one flower home, and it is said his wife wore it pinned at her collar until the autumn fairs. Oda kept the rest, and every spring the paisley bent over the wall toward the river, as though it had somewhere to be.