Colourful paisley and flower tattoo in orange, purple and green running from the upper arm down the forearm, with fine outlines and botanical detailing.

Paisley and flower arm tattoo

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows large stylised flowers, leaves and paisley swirls that wind from the upper arm down to the forearm. The linework is bold in places and fine in others, with dotted detailing along the stems and small curled tendrils. Orange, purple, green and red-brown inks fill the motifs, and the design follows the curve of the arm.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Flower Paisley Leaf Swirl Floral Tendril Dot

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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

The paisley cloth came off the wagon at Hartwell Green with the rain still on it, and Mother Ysolde would not let anyone else unfold it. Forty years she had carried that shawl, orange as a fox in the lamplight, its border of teardrop curls stitched by a hand nobody living could name. Every fair we pitched, she laid it over the lantern pole and told the children it was a map of the roads we had not yet walked.

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The boy Tobiah swore it was a map of the sea. He said the big flowers were islands and the curling vines were currents that would drag a man out past the buoys if he was careless. Ysolde only laughed and tapped the faded purple at the hem, where the thread had gone thin and a little dot of green had bled into the wool. That, she said, was where the road doubled back on itself and the ground remembered you.

When the fire-eater left for the coast with his hat full of coins, Tobiah took the shawl down to the river and tried to read it by the moon. The swirls ran down the cloth like water over a weir, each small curl ending in a bead, each bead pointing home. Ysolde came after him with her stick and found him kneeling in the reeds, the cloth spread flat as a flag on the stones.

"You've followed it wrong way up," she said, and turned it around for him.

He looked, and then he saw it. From the far end the vines were not roads at all but a hand reaching up out of the water, fingers open, offering a flower to whoever stood on the bank.