Colour tattoo of a bouquet of pansies in purple, pink, lilac and yellow with black outlines, placed across the upper back near the shoulder.

Pansy bouquet on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of pansies with a closed bud and green leaves, arranged diagonally across the upper back. The flowers have bold black outlines, with soft shading in darker purple and blue at the petal centres and a yellow centre on each bloom. The pinks, lilacs and yellows are bright and mostly even, set against the natural skin tone of the shoulder area.

Botanical Traditional Back Shoulder Pansy Flower Bouquet Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pansies came up late that spring, after the frost had gone out of the churchyard wall, and Dorothy Pyle swore she could tell a good bloom from a bad one by the way it turned its face to the light. Her barrow stood outside the Corn Exchange in Hexham every Saturday, trays of violas in yellow, lilac and a pink like boiled sweets, and she sold them by the dozen to anyone willing to crouch on the cobbles and listen.

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A young man came one Saturday in July with a bruise on his jaw and a bunch of wilting cornflowers he had bought from someone else. He said he wanted something that would last. Dorothy handed him a tray of pansies and told him they were called heartsease in her grandmother's day, and that a man who planted them had to wait to see what came up before he could say what he had planted. He asked how long that took. She said it depended on whether he remembered to water them.

He came back the next Saturday, and the one after, always with a question about soil or slugs or whether purple could sit beside yellow in a border without fighting. By September he had stopped buying anything. He stood with his hands deep in his coat and watched the flowers folding up for the night, and once he said his mother had grown them against the back wall of a terrace in Gateshead, the only thing she had ever asked the council for.

Dorothy wrapped a last cutting in damp newspaper and pressed it into his palm without taking his money. Plant it where the wall catches the morning sun, she said. Pansies don't mind being looked at, but they hate being left in the dark. He walked off down the street holding the cutting upright like a candle, and the following spring a single yellow bloom opened against the brick, then another, then a whole row of them turning their faces toward the window where he sat with his tea.