Small colour tattoo of purple and yellow pansies with scattered petals on the side of a person's neck, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pansies and petals on the side of the neck

Botanical · Neck · Colour · Photo

Three pansy blooms in purple and yellow, with a shaded centre on the largest flower, run down the side of the neck. Two single red-pink petals sit above and below the group, with softly blended edges rather than hard outlines. The soft, watercolour-like shading and the small scale leave plenty of open skin around the design.

Botanical Neck Pansy Flower Petal

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, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she's been at the pilchards again. You want the story of the heartsease wall, and I'll tell it the way my own nan told it to me, so don't interrupt till I've done.

Keep reading

Up past the chapel, where the wind comes off the Atlantic like it owes somebody money, there was a stone wall nobody built on purpose. Every spring the violas came up in the cracks of it, purple and yellow faces looking down at the harbour as if they were counting the boats. Old Tomas Keval called them heartsease and swore they were the only flowers that knew how to keep a secret. He dug them out of the lane and put them back in the wall, one at a time, for forty years.

The winter the Marigold did not come home, his wife went up every morning with a basket and picked the petals the gales had torn off. She laid them on the flagstones in a line, red-pink and bruised at the edges, all the way down to the slipway, so that whoever came up from the water would know which way the lane ran. Nobody said it was foolish. Nobody said it was anything at all.

In April the Marigold came in on the tide, low in the water, with her mainsail gone and two men aboard who could not stop laughing. They had been blown east to a sandbank and sat out the storm there eating raw limpets. When they walked up the lane they stepped over the petals without seeing them, and Tomas's wife stood at the top of the wall, shaking, and told them off for the state of their boots.

That's the whole of it. The wall's still there. Go and look at the violas if you like, but leave the petals where they fall.