Botanical colour tattoo of pressed pansies and violas in purple, yellow and red, spreading down a woman's upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pressed pansies covering an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of pansies and violas in purple, yellow, orange and deep red, with small leaves and sprigs of tiny blue and pale flowers. The blooms are drawn with soft, detailed shading that gives them a flat, pressed appearance, and they run in a diagonal band from the shoulder down the outer upper arm. The image is a side view against a plain white wall, with the wearer's striped top framing the tattoo.

Botanical Upper arm Pansy Flower Floral Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry only came on Tuesdays that winter, so Aunt Mairead and I pressed whatever the wind left us. Pansies grew in the lee of the chapel wall, purple and butter yellow and a rust orange that looked scorched at the edges. We picked them before the frost could get at them and carried them home in my cardigan pockets.

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She laid each bloom flat between blotting paper inside the atlas she had been given when she married, weighted the stack with grey stones from the beach, and told me not to peek for a fortnight. Peeking was the one thing I was any good at, so I peeked every morning before school.

By March the yellows had gone the colour of weak tea and the orange had faded to nothing, but the purples held. Mairead said some dyes are stubborn and some are generous, and you cannot tell which until the light has had its say. She kept the atlas on the windowsill where the sun came in sideways across the bay.

When the boat came back in April, I took the atlas to the mainland in a carrier bag. Nobody asked what was inside. Years later I opened it at the page marked with our island's name and found the pansies still there, paper-thin and pale, the purples risen up through the paper like a bruise deciding to bloom. Mairead was in the ground by then. I closed the book and put the grey stones back on the cover.