Close-up of a soft, watercolour-style botanical tattoo of pink and red flowers with dark stems across a person's upper arm and shoulder.

Pink blossoms with dark stems on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several pink and red flowers and buds on thin dark stems, with one larger open bloom at the centre. The petals are shaded with soft, blended washes and loose edges, and dark grey linework appears in the stems and a faint branch near the top of the shoulder. The flowers sit diagonally across the upper arm against a plain skin background and a blurred brick wall.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Blossom Bud Stem Branch Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Orrenvale trusted a colour that faded, so when the king sent for the dyer's daughter, Ysolde carried her bowl of crushed blossom up the hill with the lid tied down. The petals had gone the colour of old brick overnight. She had tried the last of the spring pink on linen, on wool, on a scrap of the king's own silk, and watched each one lose its blush by the second wash.

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The king's chamber smelt of cold ash and tallow. He wanted a red for his standards that would hold through a hundred winters, and he had heard that the dyer's family kept a secret from the old orchards beyond the wall. Ysolde showed him the bowl. He dipped a finger in and frowned at it, then at the branch she had brought in a jar, its thin dark stems bent over the rim like handwriting.

"It isn't the petal that lasts," she said. "It's the stem. Every spring the tree draws black from the roots and lays it under the blossom so the flower can open on it. Boil the stems down with the petals and the colour takes the dark with it, a little at a time, and it never runs." The king asked what it would cost him. She told him the orchards would have to be left standing, and that he would never again be able to pick the fruit for himself.

He laughed, and then he did not. Ysolde went down the hill with an empty bowl and a purse heavy with gold, and at the gate she stopped to look back. Above the wall the cherry trees were in bud, pink at the tips and dark at every joint, and she thought the king would never understand that he had bought a colour from something that had only ever been lent to him.