Traditional style colour tattoo on the thigh showing a hand holding a banner reading Forget Me Not, surrounded by purple flowers, lavender and dark green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding Forget Me Not banner and flowers

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A pale hand with a gold cuff and dark nails holds a grey banner reading Forget Me Not, with a bouquet of purple and pink flowers, dark lavender-like buds and green leaves rising behind it. The bold black outlines are filled with flat, saturated colour and soft red shading on the hand, set against the curve of the thigh.

Traditional Botanical Thigh Hand Banner Flower Peony Lavender Tulip Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guard at Hollin Bridge had kept the crossing for thirty years and had never once been asked to carry a flower. So when the old widow came up the road with lavender and peonies wrapped in brown paper, he frowned and asked what she had to declare. She held up the bouquet. 'Only what I've been told to remember,' she said, and the hand that held the stems did not shake.

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The custom was older than the wall. On the far side of the water, everyone who crossed had to leave one thing behind at the scale. Most gave coins, or a grudge, or a bad tooth's worth of pain. The widow's sister had given her own name, and nobody on this side could say it any more. The guard wrote it in his ledger each year, in the margin beside the entries for the dead, and called it a kindness.

He took the paper from her and found a card tucked among the stems. Forget me not, in careful ink. Who had written it, he could not tell, and the back was blank. 'Whose is it?' he asked. 'Yours, if you want it,' she said. 'Mine, if you don't.'

He lifted the bouquet to the lamp and the petals glowed plum and rose. He thought of his mother, whose name he had not spoken since the spring. He could not remember what she had looked like, only that she had hummed over the washing. He set the flowers on the brass pan, and it dipped, and the widow walked on across the bridge without looking back, her hands empty and light.