Three views of a full arm sleeve with black linework lilies, a sun-like circle and pink watercolour washes, on the upper arm and forearm.

Watercolour flower sleeve on arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full arm sleeve shows black linework lily-like flowers climbing the arm, with a pale circle resembling a sun and black drips running down from it. Pink and magenta washes sit around the petals and across the skin, while the outlines are drawn in a bold black line. The three side-by-side photographs show the same arm from slightly different angles, with the sleeve running from the upper arm down to the wrist.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Lily Flower Petal Sun Circle Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways off the canal since four, and you are the first to reach Stallgate Market with the key to the flower hall. Somebody has left the shutter half up. Under the sodium lamp, water runs off the iron gutter in black threads that break and knit back together, and you stand watching until the lamp buzzes and goes pale, a moon sitting in the fog.

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Dora arrives at six under a golf umbrella that has lost three spokes. She says rain is good for lilies, that it makes them stand up straight and open their throats wide, and she unwraps a bundle of stargazers from a Lincolnshire glasshouse with fingers stiff as wire. You count the buckets. Forty-two, then twelve more on the pavement that nobody has claimed. The petals have already begun to bruise pink at the edges, the colour soaking up into the brown paper like a stain you cannot take back.

By nine the unsold stems are slumped in the gutter. Dora tells you to take them to the wall above the water, and you do, carrying three buckets on your hip while the paper goes to pulp. At the rail you tip the first one out. The heads slide down into the canal and the surface breaks into rings, pale and widening, one after another, until the whole black water is full of small suns going nowhere.

When you turn round Dora is standing under the awning with two mugs of tea, and she does not ask why you were so long. The rain eases to a drizzle. She nods at the empty buckets. Tomorrow, she says, we put the good ones at the front. You believe her, because the stems will still be standing when the light comes up over the warehouse roofs.