Small blue botanical flower tattoo with leaves on the upper arm of a woman wearing a white vest top.

Small blue flower on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A small flower with layered petals and a dark centre, surrounded by three leaves, is tattooed on the outer upper arm. The outlines are dark navy and the petals are shaded in lighter blue tones with fine hatched lines. The tattoo sits near the elbow against a plain pale wall, with the subject's face and head cropped out of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pieter had been told twice already that his peony looked like a cabbage. Master Huybrecht stood over the bench with his spectacles pushed up into grey hair and a cold pipe clamped in his teeth, tapping the tile with one blunt fingernail. "Too many petals. A flower is not a pile of laundry."

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Pieter wiped the cobalt from his brush onto the rag and tried again. The tile was an ordinary white square, glazed the colour of cream and fired once already, so the surface took the paint like breath on a window. He had learned the stroke for the outer petals in March: a loaded brush, one long pull, lifting before the end so the line thinned away. The inner petals were harder. They needed hatching, fine lines no thicker than a hair, set close enough that from across the room they read as shadow and light at once.

He worked through the noon bell and the clatter of the canal barges. Outside the window, a dray horse blew steam into the cold. When he finally set the brush down, three leaves sat tucked around the bloom like folded hands, their points dark where he had pressed hardest.

Huybrecht carried the tile to the window and held it to the grey light for a long time. Then he set it on the drying rack, between a windmill and a ship nobody had ordered, and said nothing at all. Pieter understood that this was the highest praise the old man had ever given. Next week the tile would go into the kiln, and the blue would sink into the glaze and stay there for good, long after anyone remembered whose hand had chosen the hatching.