Black botanical scroll tattoo with flowers and swirling foliage running from the shoulder down the upper arm, seen from behind.

Floral scroll tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind wears a white crop top and matching skirt, showing a black floral scroll tattoo that runs from her shoulder down the outer upper arm. The design features two large flower heads with acanthus-like leaves, curling tendrils and fine dotted accents. It is rendered in solid black line and shading on a plain grey background.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Scroll Leaves Swirl Foliage Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass nameplate had to be finished before the Dorset couple came down for breakfast, so Ada Pell worked the burin at the window of Number Nine, Marine Terrace, while the kettle muttered on the gas ring behind her. Her mother ran the boarding house on the strength of three bedrooms and a great deal of starch, and she did not hold with anyone spoiling a clean morning with idle chatter. Ada did not chatter. She traced the acanthus leaves her uncle had copied from a Bavarian hymnal years before he drowned off Lyme, letting each curl come off the metal like a wave rolling back.

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The plate was for Mr Lusk, a retired sign-writer who had taken the attic room in April and paid a month in advance. He wanted the name of his late wife, Delia, set inside a scroll, and he had asked for flowers that were not roses, because Delia had said roses were for people who could not be bothered to look. Ada had drawn two heads of bloom to please him, but the stems kept running away from her pencil. By the time she lifted the plate to the light, the scroll had turned towards the harbour, and the flowers had become foxgloves, the same purple-spotted ones that grew along the cliff path where the wind was always trying to take people's hats.

She stippled the dots along the tendrils with a fine point, the way she had seen her uncle do, until the surface caught the morning like spray. When Mr Lusk came down, she did not apologise for the foxgloves. He held the plate at arm's length, then close, then at arm's length again, and said nothing for so long that the kettle boiled over and her mother swore at it from the kitchen. He paid her a sixpence, which was generous, and asked her to leave the last curl open at the end, so that it could get out.