Colour tattoo of pansies in purple, yellow, pink and white with green leaves, spreading across the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pansies across shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A cluster of pansies in purple, yellow, pink, orange and white spreads from the shoulder down the upper arm, with green leaves between the blooms. The petals are shaded with soft gradients, dark veining and blended edges, giving the flowers a naturalistic, dimensional look. Colour dominates the piece, set against dark clothing at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Upper arm Pansy Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tins were my mother's idea, mostly because she could not bear the bare wall under the gallery. Four paraffin cans, punched with nail holes, hung along the rail where the salt took everything else. She filled them with pansies from the mainland, which the boatman grumbled about every fortnight, and she told me they were called heartsease and that you could read a face in every bloom if you looked long enough.

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By November the faces had gone sour with the wind, though they kept their colours: yellow, violet, a rust-red that matched the lamp housing. My father said flowers were a poor use of paraffin, then carried the cans up the stairs himself when the storm came, because the light needed him more than the garden did and he knew it. He climbed with a lantern in one hand and a tin under his arm, cursing the rungs.

The night the Mary Ann Dunn went onto the Scarr, we kept the lamp turning while my mother read the bloom names aloud to keep her hands busy. Dark purple, nearly black at the centre. Pale lilac with a cream heart. Orange like a coal going out. When the boat's light finally showed, bobbing in the trough below us, I saw the flowers had turned as the beam swept past, every face leaning out over the rail toward the water.

Morning brought three men up the rock path and nobody lost. My father wiped the salt from the glass and found the pansies still standing, a little battered, faces still open to the sea. He said nothing about paraffin. He only moved the tins, careful as a man lifting a sleeping child, and set them where the boats could see them from the mainland.