Botanical tattoo of an open magnolia bloom with dark leaves and a stem on a forearm, shaded in black, grey and muted pink.

Magnolia flower on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A magnolia flower in full bloom sits at the centre, with a closed bud above and several dark leaves and a long stem extending down the arm. The petals are outlined in bold black lines and shaded with soft grey and muted pink-red wash, while the leaves are filled with dense black and dark grey shading. The design is framed on pale skin with a blurred dark background and a denim sleeve at the left edge.

Botanical Forearm Magnolia Flower Bloom Leaves Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bloom had to be drawn before it opened all the way, Mrs Pardoe said, or by the time the pencil reached the petals they would have forgotten what they were. Ada held the stem steady with two fingers while the glasshouse ticked and sweated around them. The specimen had come up from a swamp in Carolina in a crate that stank of brine, and its leaves were still dark with the salt of the hold, stiff as tin.

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'Outline first,' said Mrs Pardoe, leaning over her shoulder with her spectacles pushed up into her hair. 'Black ink. A magnolia has edges, Ada, and edges are what the gentlemen pay for.'

Ada drew the outline as she was told, each petal walled in with a line that would not wobble. Then she took the little pot of madder her father had ground before he died and touched the wash to the inner curl of the largest petal, where the light would seem to come from inside the flower. The colour bled soft and pink, like the inside of a shell. Mrs Pardoe made a noise in her throat that might have been disapproval.

By afternoon the leaves had gone black with shading, dense and glossy, and the bud above them stayed closed, its tip hard as a fist. Ada had meant to open it too, to finish the plate the way it was meant to look. Instead she left it shut. Nobody had ever bought a flower that had not yet decided to be one, and she found she liked the bud better for keeping its secrets.

When the ink dried, she signed the bottom corner in small square capitals, the first name that had ever gone under a plate in that house. Mrs Pardoe studied it for a long time, then pinned the sheet to the wall above the drying rack, where the pink would fade over the years into something nearly grey. Ada did not mind. She had already seen what the flower looked like at its best.