Shaded purple violet flower tattoo with a yellow centre on the upper arm, photographed with the arm raised.

Purple violet on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A single violet or pansy-style flower with five soft petals is tattooed on the inner upper arm, close to the elbow. The petals use smooth, blended shading in purple and lilac with lighter highlights, and a small yellow centre sits at the middle. The flower is centred on the arm against a plain skin background, with a dark marbled surface behind.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Petal Pansy

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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

The tyre goes soft at kilometre marker forty-one, and you are the only thing for miles that can do anything about it. The wheel brace is seized, so you kneel on the grit and lean your weight into it while the sun leans on the back of your neck. Nothing moves on the road to Tarrant Flats except heat lifting off the tarmac in sheets.

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Then you notice the violets. They grow in the crack where the verge meets the shoulder, a small clump, purple fading to lilac at the edges, each bloom with a yellow dot at its heart as if someone pressed a fingertip there to mark it. Your mother used to say violets only come up where something other than rain has been pouring. You have no idea what she meant. Maybe a cordial lorry lost a crate here last summer, or a radiator sweated itself dry on this exact stretch.

The nut gives at last. You sit back on your heels, wipe your palms on your jeans, and pick one flower, just one, and press it flat inside the sun visor where the dust can't reach it. Forty miles later a water tower rises out of the haze, then a diner with a sign that flickers the letter O.

The waitress sees the violet still tucked above the windscreen when you walk in and asks where you got it. You tell her marker forty-one. She laughs and says that verge has been planted by a dead woman's husband every spring for thirty years, and nobody has ever once asked him to stop.