Watercolour style pansy tattoo in purple and yellow with black linework on the inner upper arm.

Pansy tattoo on the inner upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A pansy flower with broad purple petals, a yellow centre and dark radiating stamen lines is shown on the inner upper arm. The petals are loosely shaded with wash-like purple and magenta tones, and the outlines are sketched in black with some lines breaking off. The flower sits centrally on the skin against a plain pale background.

Botanical Upper arm Pansy Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed tin had come aboard at Falmouth with a rattle, bought from a widow in the lane above the quay for the price of a loaf. Mara Tolley kept it in her apron pocket for the whole crossing to Newfoundland, shaking it when the wind got up, as if the seeds might answer.

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Nobody aboard thought much of flowers. The bosun said a ship was no place for things that needed water and sun. But on the fortieth day, with the biscuit gone soft and the men gone quiet, Mara cut the lid off a spare powder keg, packed it with wet sailcloth and sprinkled the seeds along the rail where the spray reached. She talked to them in the dog watch, in the plain voice her grandmother had used for hens.

Heartsease, her grandmother had called them, and said that whoever carried a pansy over water would find the sea gave back what it had taken. The men laughed at that until the first bloom opened in the grey light, purple as a bruise going gold at the heart, and the lookout swore he could see the coast. The bosun went still and touched his cap to it.

They raised land at dawn three days later. Mara carried the keg down the gangway in both hands and set it against a churchyard wall, and no one asked her why. The flowers came back every spring after, and the crew, scattered from Bristol to Quebec, took to sending her a pinch of seed in letters folded in waxed paper, so that the sea would never again be the only thing keeping count of them.