Five colour pansy flowers in a botanical style running down the upper arm of a person wearing a cream vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five pansies on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The image shows five pansy flowers arranged in a diagonal line down the upper arm, each in a different colour: blue, dusty pink, pale pink, red and deep magenta. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail in the veins and centres, which are picked out in yellow. The skin is pale and the background is a plain light wall, keeping the focus on the flowers.

Botanical Upper arm Pansy Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the light falls, boy, and mind the tar bucket. You want to know why Maud Pascoe kept five pansies on her sill when every other woman in Porthmellin grew cabbages and nothing else. I'll tell you, but you'll not like the middle of it.

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There were five boats out of Porthmellin that winter the pilchards went quiet. The Silver Gull was blue as a Sunday sky. The Hope was the dusty rose of her mother's cardigan, the Provider a pale pink like the inside of a shell, the Ada Jane a red you could spot from the lighthouse, and the Catherine a deep plum, the colour of a bruise going off. Maud bought the seed from a tinker on the Penzance road and sowed one pot for each hull, then set them in a line down the windowsill so the boats would come home in the order they went out.

The spring they all came back, every one, Maud took the pots down and stood them against the wall to dry out, and she said nothing about it. Then the Catherine went down off the Lizard in February, in weather nobody should have been out in. Maud did not cry on the quay. She went home, watered the four that were left, and let the plum one wilt. It died in a week, neat as a folded letter.

Next winter she planted a fifth pot, the same plum as the Catherine, and set it at the end of the row. Every morning she counted them before the kettle. Five pots, four boats, and one she never explained. I asked her once which of them was for the sea. She said the sea never needed telling.