Realistic tattoo of three pale flowers with teal leaves and a closed bud, shaded in grey and white, on the forearm.

Pale blooms and teal leaves on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Three large, pale flowers with softly shaded petals sit in a cluster, with a small closed bud at the upper left. Teal and blue-green leaves fill the gaps behind them, and the petals are rendered in fine grey and white shading with highlights. The design wraps up the forearm against a plain dark background.

Realism Botanical Forearm Flower Bloom Rose Bud Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The biscuit tin had air holes punched in its lid with a marlinspike, and through them three cuttings leaned as if they were listening for something. Ada Pryce had pressed them into my hands on the quay at Funchal, wrapped in wet moss and yesterday's newspaper, and told me they were the only thing she had ever stolen. I didn't ask from whom. I set the tin on the shelf above the range where the heat could reach it, then forgot it for two days, because the weather came in off the Biscay like a dropped anvil.

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In a gale a galley is all pots that refuse to sit still. I lashed the stockpot with cord, pinned the flour under a tea towel, and served porridge that tasted of salt however much sugar I threw at it. Through all of it the cuttings kept their green. On the third morning I found the first bloom had split open, its petals so white against the rust of the tin that Pilcher, the second engineer, put his head round the door just to look and forgot his tea going cold in his hand.

The second bloom opened on the Thursday, the third on the Friday. The fourth bud stayed tight as a knuckle and I kept it anyway, because Ada had asked me to.

We raised the Needles at first light, grey and close through the murk. I carried the tin up to the wheelhouse and set it on the sill where the captain could see it. He said nothing, which was his way. By the time we tied up at Southampton the galley smelled like somewhere else entirely, and I had the little closed bud in my breast pocket, ready to go ashore.