Forearm with a partly visible floral tattoo in black and red linework, beside a hand holding a white skirt printed with small coloured elephants.

Floral tattoo on a forearm beside a printed skirt

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hand holds a white skirt printed with small red, blue, pink and yellow elephants, while the upper forearm at the top right shows a partly cropped tattoo. The tattoo appears to be a floral or leafy design drawn in dark outline with touches of red and green. The background is a soft-focus green lawn, and the skin and fabric are evenly lit.

Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Elephant

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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

The block had been carved for a parade of elephants, not for the vine that had grown through the back door of the print shed in June. Your grandmother swore it was the same vine that had strangled the boat sheds at Porthleven, and she was not a woman who said things lightly, so you did not argue when she told you to leave the carving knife and take the secateurs instead.

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By Thursday the leaves had climbed the drying line and were dripping indigo onto the cobbles. Women came up the hill with buckets, not to complain but to look. Mr Tregear from the chandlery brought a sketchbook. He drew the red-stemmed leaves in dark ink, outlining each one twice, the way the old sailmakers marked a seam, and he said the plant wanted to be printed rather than cut.

So you did it. You inked the little elephants in every colour the dye-house had left: vermilion, cobalt, a pink nobody could name, a yellow like lemon rind. You pressed them onto bolts of cotton in rows that wandered, because a row that stayed straight looked dead. When the last bolt came off the board, the leaves were still there in the corner of each print, green where the dye had run thin, and nobody could say which had come first, the blossom or the beast.

The cloth went down to the quay on the Monday tide. Weeks later a letter came from a port you had never heard of, asking for more of the pattern, and folded inside it was a single pressed leaf, still smelling of the shed.