Full floral sleeve tattoo covering the upper arm and forearm, black and grey on the left panel and coloured on the right, with flowers, swirls and dotwork.

Floral sleeve tattoo on the arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full arm sleeve of stylised flowers, leaves and swirling paisley-like motifs covers the upper arm and forearm. Bold outlines are filled with fine hatching, stippled dots and concentric circles. The left panel shows the design mostly in black and grey, while the right panel shows it in orange, yellow, red and teal, with the pattern continuous across the arm.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Flower Paisley Swirl Leaf Dot Floral pattern Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pear block had split along the grain again, so Nell Haddow bound it with flax thread and wedged it in the vice while the kettle went cold on the shed stove. Outside, the edge of Corrow Wood was dripping. The mill had sent its order up the lane on Tuesday, forty bolts of cotton, every one printed with the same flowers, hooks and dotted rings she had been carving since her father died, along with a note in a clerk's hand asking whether one ink would do. Her brother Tom had read it twice and said one ink would do fine. Nell said it would not.

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She walked into the wood at noon to fetch a fresh pear bough the storm had brought down. Under the trees the ground was furred with moss, and every drop that fell from the branches had struck it in the same small ring. On a fallen beech she found bracket fungus stacked in tiers, each shelf banded in rust and cream, and beside it a clump of foxgloves nodding their speckled throats. She cut the bough, packed it in sacking and carried it home past the village pump, thinking how seldom anyone looked down at the ground.

On the printing bench she inked the first block in black and pressed it to a length of undyed cloth. The flowers came up grey and heavy, and the paisley hooks looked like smudges left by a thumb. She sat with that sheet for a long while. Then she mixed ochre from the weld and madder from the copper pot, and teal from the woad vat that Tom swore would stink the parish out, and pulled the blocks one after another, pinning each to the last. The cloth came alive under her hands, petal by petal, the dots thickening into rings.

When the bolt was finished she hung the first length from the washing line between the shed and the nearest pear tree. Tom came out wiping his hands and stood beside her looking at it. A wind came off the wood and lifted the cloth, and all the colours in it seemed to turn at once, like a meadow caught in a hurry. 'Right,' Tom said at last, 'send them the colour.' Nell was already reaching for the next block.