Colour Traditional-style tattoo of a blue columbine flower with pink petals and a red C-shaped centre, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Columbine flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A columbine flower with five blue sepals and five pale pink petals surrounds a red C-shaped centre with yellow stamens. Bold black outlines and soft shading give the blue and pink petals some dimension, and a red glow with small dots sits behind the flower. The design is centred on a plain patch of skin against a white textured background.

Traditional Forearm Flower Petal Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pell had been climbing the scree above Clear Creek since before the sun cleared the ridge, and her knees had opinions about it. She counted the blue-spurred flowers the way her mother had counted stitches, one to five, one to five, because a columbine always had five sepals pointing at the sky like the fingers of a hand that wanted to hold on. The surveyor's girl had asked her for seed in the spring. Ada had promised it the way people promise things in a town where nobody is quite sure what the next year will bring.

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She found the patch in a crack under a shelf of grey rock, where the snowmelt kept the soil wet and the wind could not reach. The petals were pale as the inside of a shell, and at their heart the stamens bobbed yellow and dusty. She knelt, took out her penknife, and began cutting the dry pods one by one into a flour sack. Below her the valley lay in a mess of tents and stovepipe smoke, and somewhere a mule was complaining about the hour.

Halfway through the third pod she stopped, because the red crescent at the centre of the bloom had caught her eye. The colour was too bright for any flower she knew. She turned the stem, the light slid off it, and she remembered the old prospectors' joke that the land had been marking its own claims long before anyone thought to write them down.

She tied the sack shut and left the rest of the patch standing, the red centres turning towards the sun like a row of small, deliberate moons. The girl would plant the seed by her father's fence and wait two summers for anything to come up. Let her wait. Ada had waited longer for less.