Colour tattoo of blue morning glory flowers and green vines with whiplash tendrils wrapping around the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Morning glory vine on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large botanical tattoo of blue and violet morning glory flowers, buds and heart-shaped green leaves climbs from the shoulder down the outer upper arm. The linework is bold and dark, with the petals softly shaded in blues and purples and the foliage in greens, and the sweeping curling tendrils give the design an Art Nouveau feel. The arm is shown in profile against a dark top and a wooden floor, with the design filling most of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Vine Leaves Tendril Bud

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down and keep your hands off the cake, because I have told this story at three christenings and one wake, and I am not telling it twice. Ruth Achterberg ran the nursery on Chapel Lane, and every August she trained morning glories up the wall of the old gasworks office, blue as a gas flame, their petals rolled tight as cigarette paper. She swore they opened only for people up before the milk cart, and she said it so often that half the parish set their alarms by her vine.

Keep reading

Her nephew Danny came over from Grimsby that summer to clear the greenhouse before the sale. He was twenty, all elbows, and he carried the cane bundles up the path without once looking at the flowers. He looked at the tendrils instead, the way they curled round the drainpipe and the gutter as if hunting for a way indoors, and he said they looked like someone had written their name in ink and then thought better of it. Ruth told him to get on with the canes.

On the last morning he was up before the milk cart, and she found him kneeling in the bed with a torch and her good scissors. He had a theory, he said, that the blooms stayed open only while somebody was watching. So he watched, and watched, until the sun cleared the chimneys and the petals began to twist shut like wet paper in a fist. He did not believe her about noon. He believed the light.

Ruth pressed a closed bud into his palm, still cool from the dew, and told him it would keep until he was ready for it. He carried it home to Grimsby in a matchbox. Last I heard, he keeps that box on the sill above the sink, and the bud is still shut, because he has never once been up early enough to see it go.