Colour traditional tattoo of several flowers and olive leaves in bold black outlines, sitting on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional flower cluster on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows five flowers in varied forms, some with five or six petals and others with a more layered star shape, surrounded by shaded olive and brown leaves. Thick black outlines define the petals and leaves, with solid fills in red, orange, yellow and teal and small black centres. The flowers are arranged in a loose cluster that wraps across the skin, with a white paper background behind the arm.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Flower Leaf Leaves Floral Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Harrow Point could say who had first planted the geraniums, only that they had come up through the cracks in the walkway the spring the lift broke for good. Mrs Adeyemi swore it was the wind. Her son said it was the pigeons. The children on the eighth floor said the flowers were tokens left by lost sailors, and that if you picked one, the stairwell would take you down to the sea.

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Old Tomasz on the third floor had a different opinion. He had come over on a ferry with a tin of seeds and a pair of brass compasses, and he was the only one willing to climb all twenty-two floors to water the cluster on the roof. He told Dilys Morgan, who was nine and had nothing better to do, that the flowers grew wherever someone had been kind to a neighbour and then forgotten it. Each bloom was a debt paid. Red for the borrowed stepladder, teal for the night of the blown fuse, gold for the soup carried up when the Hamiltons' baby had the croup.

When the council sent men with a letter to clear the balconies, Dilys stood in front of the van with her arms out. The men read the letter twice. Then the woman from flat 1412 came down with a jug of tea, the man from the bins brought a stepladder, and by teatime there were eleven people on the roof with buckets, and nobody could remember who had started it.

The flowers stayed. Tomasz died in the winter with his compasses on the windowsill, and that spring five new blooms pushed up through the walkway, one on each floor where people still knocked on each other's doors. Dilys says if you look closely you can still see the old ones, the orange gone soft and the leaves browning at the edges, holding the rest of the cluster together.