Two forearms with botanical tulip tattoos in soft pink and red washes, with thin dark outlines and green stems on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tulips on two forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two arms show tulip tattoos drawn with thin dark outlines and soft pink and red washes. Green stems curve across the skin, with buds and open blooms at different heights. The composition runs vertically across both forearms, cropped tightly around the arms.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Tulip Stem Bud Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the kettle has only just gone off and my hands are no good for the pot any more. You want the tulip bed? Then you want the story of Arthur and the bulbs, because there's no telling one without the other. He sent off to a nursery in Haarlem the winter we married, forty bulbs in brown paper, and the porter at the station laughed at him for paying so much for onions.

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They came up thin and grey-green the first April, and Arthur stood over them each morning like a man reading a letter he couldn't finish. The buds were the colour of the inside of a shell, and they hung at different heights because he'd planted them in a hurry, one against the wall, one by the bench. He drew them every evening in pencil on the backs of seed packets, the outline first, then a wash of rose he thinned with rainwater from the butt.

The year he went, the frost came late and took the open blooms. One bud on the east side never opened at all. I thought it would rot, but it dried on its stalk and stayed there, leaning out over the path as if it was waiting for someone to come through the gate. I asked the lad from next door to pull it up. He wouldn't. He said it looked like it was still deciding.

Every spring since, the rest come up in the same places, bent a little toward the light, and I let them. Mind the step on your way out. The stems cross low down where he tied them, and that's the one thing in this garden I never had the heart to straighten.