Colour tattoo of a bouquet of pink carnations, purple buds and green leaves with black stems on the inside of a forearm, in botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink carnation and purple bud bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of pink carnation-style blooms, purple buds and dark green leaves is tied with black stems and drawn with bold black outlines. The flowers are filled with soft shading in pinks and reds, with the purple buds adding contrast along the upper and left sides. The tattoo sits on the inner forearm against a pale, textured white wall with a pink fabric edge at the left.

Botanical Forearm Carnation Bouquet Flower Bud Leaf Stem

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

Tomas had only the one bunch left by the time the snow came down over the Harrow Gap. His mother had grown the carnations along the south wall, pink as boiled sweets, and she had cut them that morning and bound their stems with black thread from the spindle, the way she bound everything she meant to send over the mountain. The woman at the far inn would know the knots. She had been tying them the same way for thirty years.

Keep reading

He set off with the bunch buttoned inside his coat, the stems pressed against his ribs. The path climbed through larch and then through grey stone where nothing grew but lichen, and the wind found every gap in his collar. Halfway up he saw a purple bud pushing out of a crack in the rock, the colour of an old bruise, and he picked it and tucked it in with the others. His mother always said a flower added to a gift was worth a day's walk. He did not know if that was true. He only knew she had said it.

At the top the cairn was half buried in drift. A woman in a red shawl stood beside it, though nobody had lived above the tree line for a hundred years. She took the bunch without a word, loosened one knot, and laid the stems across the stones. The snow stopped falling. When Tomas looked down the far side, the valley was green and the inn chimney was smoking.

She handed the bunch back to him. "Your mother's knots are slack," she said. "Tell her to pull them tighter next time, or the wind will have the petals off before I can use them." Behind him the snow began again, softly, over the place where she had been standing.