Black and grey botanical arm sleeve with a large chrysanthemum at the upper arm, clouds and lily leaves running down to the forearm, in a dotwork and linework style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral arm sleeve with chrysanthemum

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows a large chrysanthemum near the top of the upper arm, with cloud shapes, lily-like blooms and leaves flowing down towards the forearm. The linework is fine and the petals are built up with stipple and dotwork shading in black and grey. The composition wraps around the arm and fades into the skin at the lower edge, with a small diamond motif near the middle.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Chrysanthemum Flower Lily Leaves Cloud Diamond

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

Sit down by the stove, and mind the kettle, for this is the winter the Marigold froze in at Oxley Lock and nobody could get her out. My grandmother's cousin Nell kept the cabin then, with a tin of pins and a pot of ink she mixed from soot and gin. She was the only one on the cut who would put a flower on a man's arm, and the bargemen paid her in bread and coal.

Keep reading

One February a lad came along the towpath with a sack over his shoulder and a cough like a broken hinge. He wanted a sleeve, from wrist to shoulder, and he wanted it done before the thaw, because his father was a chrysanthemum grower in Kent and had sent him north with nothing but a hat. Nell asked him why a chrysanthemum and not a rose. He said the rose was for lovers and the chrysanthemum was for people who came back. She didn't argue. She just started at the top of his arm, where the flower sat like a frost-burst sun, and worked down through the clouds she drew to hide the joins, until the lilies opened over his elbow and the leaves trailed off into skin.

It took nine evenings. She stippled the petals with a dot at a time, and at the bottom, where the ink ran out, she put a small black diamond, the way her mother had marked the bargeman's tally. When he left, the canal was steaming and the ice had gone grey at the edges. He pulled his sleeve down over the work and said nothing. Nell swore for a week after that she could still smell Kent hops on the stove.

The Marigold came free in March. Nobody ever saw the lad again, but every spring a crate of chrysanthemum cuttings turns up at the lock with no name on it, and Nell's niece plants them where the towpath bends, which is how the lock got its flowers.