Black and grey botanical tattoo of peony-style blooms, a dahlia, a lotus and leaves across the outer forearm, with soft pink wash on the petals.

Floral bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey floral bouquet covers the forearm, with large peony-style blooms at the lower right, a dahlia at the upper right and a lotus-like flower in the centre. Leaves, buds and stems fill the gaps and trail towards the elbow. Bold outlines and soft grey shading give the petals depth, with faint pink tones on some of the larger blooms.

Botanical Forearm Flower Peony Dahlia Lotus Leaves Bud Stem Bouquet

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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

Nobody in the function room of the Crown remembers that you were the one who painted the mural in the lower corridor, so when the buffet arrives it is Sandra Ibbotson who announces it to the table, along with the fact that you used to smell of turpentine and cheap body spray. You let her have it. The DJ is playing a song from the year you all left, and the strip lights have been dimmed to the colour of weak squash, which makes everyone look a decade kinder than they are.

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Mrs Abbott, the art teacher, told you that flowers which bloom together are a lie. Peonies belong to May, dahlias to the end of summer, and a lotus would never survive a Lancashire February. You painted them all into one vase anyway, a jumble of seasons, petals outlined so hard the paint ran. She gave you a B and wrote in the margin, "Honest, if impossible." You kept that note for years in the back of a sketchbook, not because you believed her, but because you were never quite sure she was wrong.

Now she is here, by the fire door, in a cardigan the colour of porridge, asking Dean Hollis to fetch her a sherry. Sandra is still talking about house prices. You take a napkin and a biro from the bar and start drawing without asking permission: a fat peony at the bottom, a dahlia opening sideways, a closed bud climbing the edge where the paper folds. You put in a lotus in the middle because it is the only flower you were ever told not to draw.

Mrs Abbott takes the napkin, holds it at arm's length and reads it the way she used to read coursework, lips moving slightly. "Still impossible," she says. Then she folds it into quarters and tucks it into her handbag, between a packet of mints and her bus pass, and you realise she has been carrying something from your year for a long time.