Traditional colour tattoo of a red book with fanned pages, yellow flowers and swirling scrolls on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red book with yellow flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a book with its pages fanned out at the top, set against a red cover decorated with yellow flowers, green leaves and swirling scrolls. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat fills and soft blue shading on the pages. Red, yellow, green and blue ink sit against a plain background on the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Book Flower Leaves Scroll

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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

Brother Anselm has left the cover open on the lectern again, and you must close it before Vespers, because the damp in the scriptorium has already warped the boards and the abbot counts every crack. You run your thumb along the red leather, feeling the raised tooling of the flowers, six petals each, sixteen of them across the front board, and you wonder which one the illuminator painted first.

Keep reading

The pages spill open at the top like a hand of cards held loosely. The vellum is thin enough that you can see the ink of the page behind, a psalm reversed, and somewhere in the margin a small green tendril curls up to meet the scroll on the spine. Nobody told you the scrolls were meant to keep the words from escaping. You only know that when you lift the cover, the fanned leaves tremble as though they want to be read aloud, and the blue wash along their edges makes the room feel colder than it is.

Brother Anselm returns at dusk with ink on his fingers and finds you still holding it. He does not scold. He takes the book, turns it so the light from the high window falls on the yellow blossoms, and tells you a novice painted those flowers before he died, and the abbey has kept one of them bare ever since. You look, and see the last flower is only an outline, black and patient, waiting for its colour.