Five botanical pansy designs in blue, purple and violet with yellow centres across a woman's upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five pansies across an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Five pansy flowers of different sizes are spread diagonally across the outer upper arm of a person whose face is not shown. The blooms are shaded in blue, violet and purple with soft tonal gradients and small yellow centres. The arm fills the right side of the frame against a plain, pale background.

Botanical Upper arm Pansy Flower Petal Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Halloran and Pell Travelling Show had been losing its tents for three winters, and by the time it reached the fen town of Sallow Cross there was only one ring left that still held sawdust. Old Mother Pim kept the menagerie wagon at the far end of the field, and in its window she grew pansies in tin pails, because nobody in the show could remember a season without them.

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A boy named Tobin Ashe came to sell his father's grey mare so the company could buy flour. The ringmaster, Mr Sedge, offered three shillings. Mother Pim said the mare was worth ten and that the show owed her for the lean summer. She asked for one thing instead: that the boy stay and paint faces on her flowers, five to a sprig, one blue and the rest violet, each with a yellow heart, because a flower painted true would bring the crowds back before the frost.

Tobin painted through the night with a squirrel-hair brush and a saucer of ink. Each bloom he finished he laid on the wagon step, and by dawn there were five, shaded deep at the throat, with the fen wind lifting their faces toward the tent poles as if they were listening for the band.

The crowd came that Saturday, though nobody could say why, and the show played to a full ring for the first time in years. Mr Sedge never learned what the flowers had to do with it. Tobin kept the brush, the grey mare stayed in her stall, and in the fen towns they still say that a pansy painted with patience will turn its head when the tent is about to fill.