Colour tattoo of a purple pansy inside a black lace doily border on the inner forearm, in a botanical realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pansy in a lace doily on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pansy flower with purple, violet and pale blue petals and a small yellow centre sits on the inner forearm. A black lace doily border surrounds the flower, with bold, solid outlines. The petals use soft gradients and shading for a realistic, dimensional look against the light skin.

Botanical Realism Forearm Pansy Flower Lace Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, love, and keep off the wall where the ivy's come through, it bites. Now sit, and let me get my breath back. You want the story of Mrs Ada Pell and her pansy bed, or you want to stand there looking at the kettle? Good. Sit.

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Ada kept a border along the south wall of the vicarage garden, forty feet of pansies the whole village came to gawp at. Purple and violet, some the pale blue of skimmed milk, every one with a little yellow eye looking up at you as if it had been caught out. Each morning she went down with her scissors and a doily her mother had crocheted, lace so fine you could read the Gazette through it. She'd lay it over the bed and say the flowers were too proud to be left bare.

Colonel Harrow's wife called it vanity. The vicar called it a sin against the slugs. Then one September a frost came early and took every bloom in the parish except the ones under the lace, because the lace held the cold off like a hand cupped round a match. Ada never said a word about it. She only folded the doily up, shook the dew from it, and put it back in her apron pocket.

The doily's in my drawer now, with one pansy pressed flat in the middle, gone the colour of weak tea. Ask me what I learned from it and I'll tell you nothing, because Ada didn't tell me anything either. She just handed me the scissors. Right, the kettle. Pour it yourself, my hands are not what they were.