Colour botanical tattoo of pansies with green leaves on the outer thigh, shown beside a painted watercolour version of the same flowers being worked with a brush.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pansy cluster tattoo on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The left panel shows a colour tattoo of a cluster of pansies with purple, yellow, burgundy and blue petals and dark green leaves on the outer thigh, with a hand lifting a teal striped fabric beside it. The petals use soft shading and white highlights along the veins, with clean outlines around the main flowers. The right panel shows a painted watercolour pansy arrangement with a fine brush touching one petal, in a similar palette.

Botanical Thigh Pansy Flower Leaves Watercolour Paintbrush

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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 cook, Mr Haddow, swore the pansies would never survive the Roaring Forties, so I kept the pot wedged between the flour bin and the bulkhead where the galley lamp could warm it. Five weeks out of Plymouth the leaves had gone the colour of old pennies, and I had stopped checking them twice a watch.

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They came from my mother's back step in Stonehouse: three yellow-faced heads and one burgundy that she swore carried the same blood as the ink in the hymn book. Heartsease, she called them. The boys on the quay called them jump-up-and-kiss-me, which is why she planted them where the gate met the path, so that every man leaving for sea would have to brush past them.

On the morning we raised the Horn the ship lay over hard and the pot went skidding into the scuppers. I was on my knees in brine and wet loam with the steward cursing behind me when I saw one stem still green, a single petal the purple of bruised plums lifting its face at the grey light. I held it up to the lamp for the whole of the middle watch, not breathing too hard, while the sea hammered the hull like a fist on a door.

At Valparaíso I pressed it flat between the pages of her hymn book and posted it home without a note. The stamp cost me fourpence, and the postmaster charged another penny for the weight of the pressing, which I paid gladly, because she would know exactly what it meant.