Colour botanical tattoo of pink roses, yellow blooms, green leaves and dark berries across a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Watercolour florals across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with a cluster of pink roses, a yellow bloom, green leaves and a trail of dark berries that curves down the arm. The petals and leaves are rendered with soft, painterly shading and gentle colour transitions, with some faint leaf outlines. Colour dominates the piece, set against plain skin and a pale top and grey wall in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the wreath for Mrs Pargeter's sideboard is finished, and I ruined the yellow bloom twice before getting it right. Mother says I should leave well alone, but a flower that looks correct by lamplight can look like mustard by morning. So I wet the brush, lifted the petals with a rag, and let the colour bleed into the paper where it wanted to go.

Keep reading

The roses took no persuading. Pink rolls out of the brush as if it had been waiting in the water pot all winter, and the leaves came next, sage on top and a grey-green underneath where the light doesn't reach. Mr Hallam at the works wants the berries darker, the sort that stain a finger when you pick them. I told him dark things on a page look heavier than they are, and that I would rather he hung it in a room where people feel like sitting down.

The last of the berries went on yesterday afternoon. I trailed them down the margin in a loose curl, the way the bramble ran along the back wall of the orchard the summer you broke your wrist. You will laugh, but I kept thinking of you falling off that wall and me holding the basket.

Post this to the lodgings in Crewe when you have a settled address, and I will send the spare sheet with it. Keep the brushes dry. Yours, Ada.

P.S. The yellow came out right on the third go. I did not tell Mother it was the third.

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