Split image: a colour botanical tattoo of roses and flowers on an upper arm, beside a black and grey dotwork whale and moon inside a triangle on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral upper arm and whale calf tattoos

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The left photo shows a woman's upper arm with a colour tattoo of roses, peonies and smaller flowers with soft, painterly shading. The right photo shows two calves with black and grey tattoos of a whale, clouds and a crescent moon inside solid black triangles, with stippled dotwork shading on the whale. The composition is a side-by-side pairing of two close-up skin photographs.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Calf Rose Peony Flower Whale Moon Cloud Triangle Star

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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 bus from Saltholm stops at the top of Fenner Hill, and you walk down with the wet order sheet under your arm, the one with forty peonies that the florist's boy has written down wrong again. Mrs Abbot has sent her girl to the chapel with white roses, and nobody has told the bride that the frost came early. You are nineteen and you know the shop better than your mother's kitchen: the zinc buckets, the reel of wire, the cold tap that runs brown for a minute before it clears.

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Your father kept the light at the harbour mouth for twenty-two years, and he used to say a whale has no need of a map. He said it at the window every night when the sky over the bay went the colour of ink and the cloud broke open to show the moon. You did not believe him then. You believe him now, standing in the back room with a bucket of cut stems, because the cloud has come in low over the breakwater and the moon sits inside it like a coin at the bottom of a glass.

On the Thursday you cut a dozen blooms that have no business flowering in October, deep pink, their heads heavy as fists, and wrap them in yesterday's newspaper. Mrs Abbot comes in with her purse already open and asks what she owes. You tell her nothing. You watch her face go soft at the edges, and only then do you understand you have not been talking about flowers at all.

You leave at dusk with the bucket empty and take the cliff path, the way your father took it. Out past the breakwater a grey back rises and sinks, rises and sinks, and the moon lies across it like a ribbon someone has let go of. You stand there until the cold gets into your hands, and you count the breaths it takes for the whale to come up again.