Three views of a full arm sleeve tattoo in colour, showing blue tulip buds, swirling scrolls and pale clouds across the upper arm and forearm.

Full arm sleeve with tulips, clouds and scrolls

Japanese · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The sleeve covers the shoulder, upper arm and forearm, with blue tulip buds near the shoulder and a cluster of blue, orange and green scrolls and waves flowing down the arm. Pale cream clouds with soft grey shading sit among the swirls, and the outlines are dark and clean. The image is a triptych of three angles of the same arm against a plain grey top and dark background.

Japanese Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Tulip Flower Cloud Scroll Swirl Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tulip bulbs came into Saltmarrow Quay in the hold of a Dutch hooker, forty crates wrapped in wet sacking. The harbourmaster's wife said nothing would grow in a place where the wind came off the water so hard, but Nell Harrow bought the first crate anyway, with the money her father left in a tin under the stairs.

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She planted them on the cliff above the lifeboat house, where the spray reached in winter and left salt on the soil. Most of them rotted. The ones that lived grew stems the colour of pewter, and in April they opened into cups of blue so pale they looked like the sky had been poured into them. Fishermen said the flowers meant the sea was tired of taking things, and they stopped on the cliff path to look.

In the autumn a fog came in off the Channel and sat on the town for nine days. Nell walked up each morning with a lantern and cut the last closed buds, bundling them inside her coat, because her uncle's boat had gone out in the first week and not come back. On the ninth morning the fog tore open, and the boat stood at the mouth of the harbour, low in the water, with two men aboard and no sign of the third.

She did not ask where he was. She put the buds into the nearest hand and watched the blue run down the wet wood of the bow like a wave finding its way home. Then she went back up the cliff with the lantern still lit, and in the spring she planted what was left where the wind could not reach.