Watercolour-style flower tattoo in blue, pink and purple on a shoulder, with black linework trailing down the upper arm.

Watercolour flower on shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large loose flower sits over the shoulder and runs onto the upper arm, with petals fanning out in purple, pink and blue. Thin black sketchy lines outline the bloom and trail down the arm, with splatters of red and purple ink scattered around it. The soft blended colour and open composition give the piece a painted, watercolour-like look, and the wearer's face is not shown.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Petal Splatter Linework Bloom

Find an artist for this

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

You are scrubbing the last of the pit dirt from the paint tin when the hooter goes for the final time, and the sound drops into the yard like a dropped spanner. Your father's tin of watercolour cakes has sat on the lamp-room shelf since the winter he stopped coming home clean. Half the pans are cracked. The purple is still good. You wet the brush on your tongue the way he did, and the taste of cold tea and brass comes up, and you laugh at yourself for it.

Keep reading

Down at the lower sidings they are pulling the headgear apart. Nobody in Ferrier Row talks about it except through the net curtains. Mrs Dunn across the street has been putting out a white jug of cow parsley every morning since the notice went up, as if flowers could argue with the council. You take the tin and the good sable out to the back wall of the wash house, where the lime render is still rough enough to hold a wash of colour, and you start with one purple stroke that you let run until it bleeds into blue.

By dusk the wall holds a bloom the size of a dinner plate, petals fanned out and bleeding at the edges where the water ran. You go over the outline in black ink with a dip pen, quick and loose, the way he drew the winding gear on the backs of his shift tickets, and you flick red from the brush handle across it so it looks as if something has been shot through the middle. The lines climb the wall and trail down towards the drain as if they are looking for a way out.

Mrs Dunn comes round the back at last light with her jug and stands for a long while. Then she sets the cow parsley down beneath your flower, very carefully, as if laying a wreath, and says nothing at all. Above the rooftops the hooter sounds once more, a thin sound, and this time you do not flinch from it.