Colour traditional-style tattoo of a red flower, yellow flower and green leaves wrapping around a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and yellow flowers with green leaves on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a colour tattoo showing a large red flower with yellow-outlined petals and a dark centre, alongside a smaller yellow flower and several green leaves with dark outlines. The bold black linework and flat solid fills are typical of traditional tattooing, and the design curves around the limb. The background is out of focus and shows a grey fabric and a patterned surface.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Floral

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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 rain has come in sideways across the field at Hollin Common, and you are up a stepladder with a pot of cadmium red, finishing the last petal of the great bloom that will sit on the side of Crowther's Dodgems canopy. Your uncle Sid always said a fairground needed three things: loud music, bad tea and one flower nobody could mistake for anything else. He painted the roses on the gallopers for thirty years before his hands gave out, and now the brushes are yours.

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Mr Crowther wants the red one bigger. You tell him a bigger flower only looks smaller once the wind gets under the canvas, and he grunts, then studies the chalk sketch on the board. Every petal is outlined in black and edged in yellow ochre so it glows like a lamp when the lights come on. The stamens are a ring of cream dabs around a centre you have painted nearly black, the way Sid taught you, so the bright parts look brighter against it.

By dusk the generator is coughing and the bulbs stutter on one by one. The green leaves you dragged out of the tin catch the glow and seem to shift when the wind pushes the lorries. Crowther's daughter, nine years old and sitting on a crate with a paper cone of chips, asks why the flower doesn't smell. You say the only thing that smells round here is the turps. She says that's a shame. You tell her you'll try harder tomorrow.

At first light the lot is half down and the trailers are lined up for the main road. You look back from the cab mirror and the red bloom is still bright against the grey sky, the yellow one you tucked onto the far panel barely visible behind it. A lad with a phone is taking a picture of it from the gate, and you realise he is photographing the one part you painted in a hurry.