Realistic colour tattoo of two plumeria flowers with pink, red and orange petals shaded to yellow, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two plumeria flowers on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two overlapping plumeria blooms, each with five rounded petals radiating from a yellow centre. The petals are shaded smoothly from deep pink-red at the edges to warm orange and yellow, giving a soft, three-dimensional look. The flowers sit diagonally across the forearm against a white textured towel.

Realism Botanical Forearm Plumeria Flower Petal Bloom

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow House has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the cutting wrapped in a copy of the Evening Standard, eleven floors of concrete smelling of bleach and somebody else's dinner. Mr Fenwick is waiting on his landing with the door propped open by a bucket of sand. He got the stick from a ship's chandler in Honolulu in 1971, when he was twenty-two and working the cargo cranes, and he has kept it alive since through three damp winters on a south-facing sill. It has flowered twice in that time. Both years, he says, he was certain he was dying.

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He hands you the cutting with a tenderness that embarrasses you. The stem is grey and tough, and at the tip there's a knot of pale green that he insists is a promise. He wants it planted in the strip of earth behind the bins, where the car park meets the playground fence. Plant it where the sun reaches it at four, he says, and don't fuss. You tell him you can't promise anything, and he laughs and says the flowers don't need promises, only a wall, a bit of patience and someone to remember to water them.

You carry it down in both hands. Between the sixth and fourth floors the stairwell is warm for no reason anyone has ever explained, and the air starts to smell faintly sweet, like a place much further away. By the ground floor the first bloom has opened in the paper, its petals pink at the edges and deepening to gold toward the middle, as if the colour had been poured in from the outside.

You dig a hole with a plastic spoon from the chip shop bag in your pocket, press the cutting into the dark soil, and sit back on your heels while the car park lights come on one by one above you.