Watercolour-style pansy tattoo with black linework, purple petals and a yellow centre, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pansy flower on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pansy or viola flower with bold black outlines and loose purple washes in its petals. The centre is yellow with fine dark stamen lines radiating outwards, and pink wash marks sit to the right of the bloom. The flower is centred on a limb with plain skin and a light fabric edge visible at the sides.

Botanical Upper arm 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

Ysolde Pike had sold nothing since the bell rang for the Tuesday market, and the rain had got into the cabbages and the cloth of every stall. Her pansies sat in tin buckets under a sheet of oilcloth, purple and yellow faces turned up as though they wanted to be looked at.

Keep reading

A man came along the row when the lamps were being lit, his collar up and his boots ruined. He stopped at her bucket and said he wanted something for a woman who no longer knew his name. Ysolde told him the old people called these heartsease, and that a bunch given in the rain was taken either as a kindness or as a sorrow, depending on who held it. He asked which. She said it depended on whether he meant to stay.

He bought three stems, paid in coppers, and walked off towards the almshouse on Cutler's Lane. Ysolde watched the rain strike the purple petals and run them down into the yellow throats, so each flower bled colour onto the wet cobbles like paint on a page left out in weather.

The next morning she went to the almshouse, though nobody had asked her to. The man was sitting by a window with the three stems in a jar, their colour gone pale and blurred. The woman beside him was turning one of them slowly between her fingers. She said it was the first thing all week that had made sense. Ysolde went home with empty buckets and the rain still falling, and she never charged for heartsease again.