Colour tattoo of a pink rose and magnolia buds with green leaves and blue and pink watercolour splashes, on the calf.

Pink rose and magnolia watercolour tattoo on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A pink rose with green leaves sits at the top of the design, with a pink magnolia bloom and buds below it and a small bud on the left. The flowers are rendered with soft shading and smooth transitions, while loose blue and pink splashes spread behind and beneath them, down towards the ankle. Colour ink dominates the composition, which is photographed straight on against a dark background.

Botanical Calf Rose Magnolia Flower Bud Leaves Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late in August the apples hung so heavy they bent the boughs, and Maud Tolley still had not finished the gate. Her father had left her a pot of pink paint, a brush worn down to three hairs, and a promise made to the orchard that the rose by the gate would bloom again before the frost. It had not bloomed since he took the cart down to the coast and failed to come back up.

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She painted it anyway, one petal a night, and then the magnolia that had come over the water in a barrel of earth two winters before. The pink ran thick and then thin as the evenings cooled. When the blue ran out she took it from the ford itself, scraping the stones the carters had scratched white, and mixed it with cold spring water until it stained her knuckles.

On the last night her hand slipped and she flung the blue down the path. It ran from the gate to the ford in loose spatters, as if someone had thrown it in temper, and where it touched the water the stream took it and carried it off. In the morning there were prints of blue on the flagstones, going down the lane one after another, each a little smaller than the last.

Maud followed them to the water. Her father was sitting on the far bank with his boots off and a basket of apples at his feet, and he looked up as though he had only stepped out for a moment. She did not ask him where he had been. She crossed the stones, held out the brush, and waited for him to take it.