Colour realism tattoo of a red rose, white daisies, pansies and a blue butterfly covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic floral sleeve with rose and daisies

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full floral sleeve covers the upper arm and shoulder, with a large red rose at the centre and white daisies along the lower edge. Pink, yellow and purple flowers, including pansies, sit above, with a blue butterfly near the top of the shoulder. The shading is soft and detailed, with bright colour and a loose, painterly blended background behind the blooms.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Daisy Pansy Flower Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Dutch lorries came in after midnight, and by half two the hall smelled of wet earth and cut stems. My job was the buckets. I pulled the pansies first, because they bruised if you looked at them wrong, and I kept the roses apart from the daisies so the petals stayed clean.

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My uncle Ray had painted shop signs for the stalls before the market moved out past the rail arches. He taught me that a red rose is mostly shadow. Pick the darkest crimson you own, he'd say, then go darker in the folds where nobody thinks to look. He painted everything that way, loosely, the background bleeding into the blooms until you couldn't tell where the sky stopped and the petals started.

The winter he got sick, he stopped coming to the hall and sent me instead, with a list scribbled on the back of an old invoice. The same things every week: a dozen red roses, two bunches of white daisies, pansies if they were fresh. He never said what they were for. I found out when I cleared his flat and saw a board propped against the wall, a painting of exactly that, the rose at the centre, daisies tumbling along the bottom edge, and a blue butterfly perched on the top corner as if it had just landed to decide.

I carried the board to the hall the next morning, before the buyers arrived. I stood it on an upturned crate by the loading door, where the first grey light would fall across it, and set a jar of his daisies underneath. A porter asked whose it was. I told him it was the best thing anyone in that building had ever made, then I went back to the buckets.