Traditional style tattoo of a bouquet of red, orange and purple flowers with teal leaves and berry stems, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower bouquet on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of stylised flowers and leaves runs up the forearm, with red and orange blooms, purple five-petalled flowers and small pink blossoms. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, purple, teal and brown give it a classic traditional look, with thin stems topped by dotted buds. The design is centred on the arm against a dark patterned fabric and a pale background.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Flower Bouquet Leaves Bud Stem Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Queen of Harrow Vell has sent no bouquet to the palace for three summers, and this year her letter, written in green ink, asks for red poppies, purple thistles and the pink blossom that grows only on the north wall of the Serrin orchard. You are sent up the mountain road with mud to your knees and a ledger under your coat, and you arrive to find old Maud Tallow already cutting stems with a bone-handled knife.

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She does not look up. "Hold the buds steady," she says, and hands you a fistful of thin stems topped with tight dotted seeds like peppercorns. You learn that the grey thread must be pulled snug but never tight, that teal leaves go outermost where the wind can reach them, and that the brown ones are tucked low so they look as though they grew there by accident. The poppies sit in the middle, their centres dark as wet slate, and Maud makes you set each one twice before she will nod.

When the bundle is bound, she lifts one blossom from the crock and holds it to the light. It is the wrong season for it, and the petals are still closed. "That one isn't for the Queen," she says. "Keep it in your coat. It opens when the cart crosses the river, and you'll want to be looking at the water when it does."

You carry the bouquet down through the orchard gate and along the valley road. At the river the cart judders over the ford, and something soft brushes your collar. By the time the palace gates come into view, the pink flower has unfurled against your ribs, and the guards at the gate lift their heads at the smell of an orchard in spring, wondering where it came from in the middle of autumn.