Floral tattoos on shoulders and arms

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

This collage shows six close photographs of floral tattoos on skin, with one stag head surrounded by roses on the inner forearm. The poppies and peonies on the upper arm and shoulder are shaded with soft gradients in red, pink and green, while the blue flowers on another shoulder are rendered in a single blue tone. The black and grey chrysanthemums and beetle on the upper back are shaded with fine detail, and the lace clothing in several shots frames the designs.

Botanical Realism Forearm Upper arm Shoulder Stag Antler Rose Poppy Peony Flower Bouquet Blue flower Chrysanthemum Beetle Wildflower Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies had gone soft by ten o'clock, their crinkled red petals bruising at the edges where the rain found its way under the canvas. Dad would have tipped the whole bucket into the gutter and started again, but I'd inherited the stall with its brass scales and its habit of keeping every bloom that could still hold water. Saltergate market smelled of wet cardboard and diesel, and nobody buying in weather like this wanted anything that wasn't perfect.

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Mrs Adeyemi came under the awning at half eleven, shaking out an umbrella that had given up on her. She asked for what she always asked for on a Thursday: three pale peonies and a handful of blue cornflowers for the mantelpiece. She never said who the mantelpiece was for, and I'd stopped asking after the first month. I reached for the peonies in the back bucket, the ones I'd been saving for a wedding order, and the drips ran off my elbows as I wrapped them in brown paper.

She stopped at the poppies. Her hand hovered over them the way you'd test a stove. "Harold grew these along the back fence," she said. "He used to say poppies were the only flower that wouldn't pretend to be anything else." I didn't know what to say, so I took the last dry sheet of newspaper from under the counter and wrapped the poppies in it, gave her the bundle for nothing, and she tucked it under her coat against the weather.

I watched her go down the lane, the paper going dark at the corners, the red showing through like a struck match. Behind her the rain kept running off the awning in one clean line, and the bucket of ruined stems tipped quietly over into the gutter.