Colour tattoo on a forearm of red tulips, teal leaves and purple swirls framing a black and blue ornamental letter, in a traditional style.

Red tulips and ornamental letter on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold ornamental letter in black with blue outlining sits at the centre, surrounded by four red tulips with yellow tips, teal leaves and thin purple scrolls. The linework is heavy and dark, with the black areas shaded solidly and the blue used as an edge highlight. The design is centred on the forearm and photographed straight on against a blurred indoor background.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Tulip Flower Leaf Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, the urn's only just boiled and I've not finished. You'll remember the board in the old hall, the one with the great looping capital painted across it in black and blue. Nobody in this room could paint a letter like that now, and Mr Pryce knew it, which is why he sent for Hannah Tull the summer we all sat our exams.

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She came up from the coast on the carrier's cart with a tin of paints and a brush wrapped in a dishcloth. She did the capital first, shading the thick strokes black so they seemed to sit proud of the wall, then ran a thin blue edge along them, like light off wet slate. After that came the tulips, four of them, because Mr Pryce had said the school needed something that would come back every spring. Red petals, yellow tips, teal leaves, purple scrolls curling off like the ends of a shepherd's crook.

Every morning she came in before the bell and touched up one petal with a brush no thicker than a hair. I asked her once why she bothered when the wall was already perfect. She said a letter was only a door, and the flowers were what grew on the step, and a step needed looking after. I thought she was daft. I still think she was a bit.

The school shut the year after, and they took the board down to save the wall for the council. I went round to the caretaker's shed last spring, and there it was propped against the mower, the paint gone soft at the edges but the reds still red. Look closely at the lowest tulip and you'll see a tiny pencil date under the petal, the day she finished. That's where the story stops, if you ask me, because the door's still open and the flowers are still growing.