Traditional style tattoo of a yellow cottage with a red roof and door, a dotted heart of smoke, and a teal flower with green leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cottage and flower on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cottage with a red roof, red chimney and red door sits above a teal five-petalled flower with a dark centre and green leaves. A dotted heart rises from the chimney. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the clapboard walls are shaded in yellow and orange. The design is centred on the forearm against a plain background.

Traditional Forearm House Flower Leaves Heart Chimney Smoke

Find an artist for this

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

The stew had caught on the bottom of the big pot again, and I was scraping at it with the wooden spoon when Hollis came down the companionway shouting that the bread was burning. I told him the bread would live. Fourteen days out of Liverpool, the flour had gone weevilly, the onions were sprouting like a child's hair, and I had one tin of condensed milk left, which I was saving for my own cup.

Keep reading

Every galley I have worked in has had a shelf for keepsakes. Mine held a tea caddy my mother painted for me the year I left home, a yellow cottage with a red door and a red chimney, a teal flower by the step. She used to say that on still winter mornings our own chimney drew a heart in the air, and that a sailor's mother could tell from the sky whether her boy was thinking of her. I never saw the heart from the sea. I only ever saw the grey.

Hollis came back up the ladder to ask what I was grinning at. I said I was feeding forty men a supper that smelled of a front door being opened. He laughed and called me soft, then took the bread out black on one side and ate the good crust off the top anyway.

On the night watch I leaned on the cold rail and breathed out. The breath hung for a moment in the lamplight, curled up into a small loose ring, and I traced a heart in it with one finger before it dissolved. Then I went back down to the galley, set the kettle on the range, and squared the caddy's lid against the shelf edge. It was not a house yet. But the kettle began to sing, and the stew stopped catching, and somewhere ahead of us, past all that grey water, a chimney was smoking.