Black and grey pansy tattoo inside a solid black circle on the inner forearm, with leaves shaded in grey.

Pansy in a black circle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pansy flower with pale, unshaded petals and a dark central blotch sits inside a solid black circle. Leaves and stems behind the bloom are rendered in soft grey shading with fine detail. The tattoo is shown on the inner forearm against a light background, with a dark-clothed figure and shoes visible at the lower right.

Botanical Blackwork Forearm Pansy Flower Leaves Circle

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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 mule had taken the old drove road over Carrick Gap before the snow closed it, and by the time I reached the cairn the light had gone the colour of pewter. Agnes was standing in the lee of the dead wall, nose down, pretending to chew. I was too busy being angry at her to notice the ring at first: a circle of bare black ground, perfectly round, where the snow had melted back from a flat stone no bigger than a saucer.

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On the stone sat a pansy. Three petals as pale as candle wax, two of them frayed where the frost had got at them, and a dark blotch at the throat like a thumbprint pressed into ink. Under the bank the leaves had gone silver with rime but were still green beneath. My grandmother called them heartsease and said you never picked one on a pass, because whoever had sown it there had been coming back for a long time.

I should have left it. Instead I knelt in the wet and scraped the snow from the stone with my glove, which is how I found the letters cut into its underside, two initials and a year, 1911, and a second date beneath them, scratched later and shaky. I didn't read the second one. I put the stone back, flower and all, and brushed the snow over it like a blanket. Agnes came and stood close, breathing warm on my neck, and together we went down into the valley with the bell on her collar ringing the way it does when she is pleased with herself.