Colour realism tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder showing a purple crocus with bulb and roots, grass, a caterpillar, beetle, bumblebee, moth and jumping spider.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crocus and insects on upper arm and shoulder

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two side-by-side photographs show a large colour tattoo wrapping the upper arm and shoulder, centred on a purple crocus with its bulb and roots. Surrounding it are green grass blades, a yellow caterpillar, a dark beetle, a bumblebee, a green luna-style moth, a pink butterfly, a jumping spider and small ants. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients on the petals and insect bodies, and the composition runs diagonally from the shoulder down the outer arm.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Flower Root Grass Beetle Moth Butterfly

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 crocus came up through the frost on the third of February, three days before anyone on the quay would admit that winter was thinning. Maud Trevithick found it while sorting seed packets in the glasshouse behind the harbour master's cottage, its purple cup open to a sky the colour of wet slate. She knelt on the cold flags with her notebook balanced on one knee and drew it before her tea went stone cold.

Keep reading

Her brother Sol came in stamping mud from his boots and said the bees were out already, the fat bumble ones slow over the wallflowers. He said it the way he said everything about bees, as if they were behind on their rent. Maud did not look up. She was drawing the grass blades bending under nothing, and then a yellow caterpillar folded itself onto a leaf beside the bulb, and then a beetle the colour of a coal scuttle, and then the ants, a loose line of them running up from the roots like messengers who had forgotten their letters.

By April the notebook held a whole winter of visitors, each one arriving the week the crocus needed it. The spider came after the ants had carried off the seeds. The moth came with the first warm night, when the lamp on the breakwater drew everything in from the dark. The night before the dredgers came for the old mooring chain, Maud counted her creatures on her fingers and found she had drawn one more than she could account for, a pale insect with a stripe like a lighthouse beam, which had never once landed on the flower.

She lifted the bulb the next morning, roots and all, and wrapped it in wet newspaper for the train to a nursery that promised to take in strays. On the platform she unwrapped it to check. Two new roots had already pushed through the paper, pale and blind, reaching for the carriage window as if they knew which way the sea was.