Colourful scrolling tattoo with turquoise, yellow and red flowers on a forearm, with a small grey motif below it.

Turquoise scroll and flower forearm tattoo

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large floral scroll sits on the inner forearm, built from turquoise swirls, yellow and red petals, and green leaf-like shapes. Small red and yellow blooms and fine dark stems extend towards the wrist, and a smaller grey motif sits lower down the arm. The linework is bold and the colour is flat and solid, with soft shading in the swirls.

Neo-trad Forearm Scroll Flower Leaf Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Signe,

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The ground copper came up from the valley in a stoppered jar, and I have been mixing it with linseed all week so the blue would hold. Father says I am wasting good oil on a trunk. I told him it is your trunk, and you are going across the water with it, so it had better look like something a person would miss. He grumbled and went out to the byre.

I started at the lid, where the scroll begins at the corner and curls inward like a wave that has forgotten where the shore is. The first swirl took me three evenings. Each stroke has to leave the brush at the same pressure or the curve goes lopsided, and mine kept going lopsided, so I wiped it off twice with turpentine and sat with my cup of cooling coffee until my hand stopped shaking. The yellow petals are easy. The red ones want patience, because the red sinks into the wood if you hurry it.

On the last night I pressed the little pewter fish from Mother's drawer into the hollow of the lowest curl, before the paint set, so it will always sit where the swell breaks. Do not scrub it off when you unpack. It is the only thing on the trunk I did not plan.

Write to me from the first port. I will know your letter by the blue on the envelope, I think, from across the room.

Your sister, Ragnhild