Watercolour-style botanical tattoo of two blue cornflowers with green stems and a leaf on the inner forearm.

Cornflowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two cornflower heads in blue and violet, one larger and one smaller, joined by thin green stems and a single pointed leaf. The soft, blended shading and loose edges give the flowers a painted watercolour look rather than hard outlines. The design runs diagonally up the forearm against a plain skin background, with a striped top and wooden surface behind.

Botanical Forearm Flower Stem Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barque Marigold had been nine weeks out of Falmouth when the bosun's mate found the tin wedged behind the spare sails. Inside, under a rind of waxed paper, lay a dozen pressed cornflowers, their blue faded to the colour of old ink. Ned Tallack turned the tin over in his palms while the watch chanted at the halliards, and he thought of the lane above his mother's cottage where the flowers grew thick as bees in July among the barley.

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The steward, a grumbling man called Pell, had died off the Horn in March, and nobody had claimed his belongings. Ned took the tin to the galley, where the cook let him kneel by the stove with a bowl of seawater and a pinch of soil from the ballast bag. He pressed the seeds into the dark grit and set the bowl on the sill, where the sun slanted through the salt-clouded porthole for an hour each noon.

Nothing happened for a fortnight. The crew laughed at him, and the captain, passing with his telescope, said nothing at all. Then one morning off the coast of Chile, two green shoots pushed through, thin as threads, and by the end of the week they stood as tall as a man's hand. Ned sat with them through the squalls, shielding them with his oilskin whenever the spray came over the rail.

When the Marigold tied up at Valparaíso, the first blooms opened: a large head and a smaller one, violet at the petal edges and blue at the heart, beaded with the last of the sea air. Ned wrapped the pot in sailcloth, carried it ashore, and set it on the wall of the customs house, where a woman selling bread looked up and said they were the colour of the sky at home. He told her it was. That was enough to be going on with.