Watercolour-style tattoo of a red and black flower with loose splashes of colour on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style flower on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A single flower with dark sketchy black outlines and petal details sits at the centre of the design, with its petals and stems fading into loose red wash. Small teal and green splashes and ink drips add colour around the edges of the motif. The tattoo is photographed close up on a lower leg, with denim and a pale surface in the background.

Botanical Calf Flower Petal Watercolour Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold your brollies low and shuffle in under the tarpaulin, the lot of you, because the rain has never once stopped a good tale in this square. Now. Old Mrs Penhallow kept the flower stall by the well, the one with the iron bucket, and every morning she unwrapped a single lily from brown paper and set it in a jar of rainwater. Nobody bought it. She said it was not for sale, only for looking at.

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The summer the paving went down, a boy came with a sack of charcoal and a tin of red paint and asked why the stall had no roof. She told him the roof was the sky, and the sky had never once charged her rent. He stood there dripping while she talked, and when she turned back he had drawn that very lily on the wet stone with a stick of burnt wood, black lines quick and nervous, the petals lifting as if they had somewhere else to be. Red bled out from the edges where the rain had softened the chalk. She laughed until she had to sit down on the bucket.

Next morning the boy was gone, but the lily was not. The rain came all week and the drawing ran. The black wandered off into the gutters, and the red settled into the cracks like a bruise going gold. Teal and green splashes turned up on the cobbles where the fishmongers rinsed their trays, and folk swore the drips had a rhythm to them. Mrs Penhallow never swept them up. She said a flower that could not survive a little weather was never a flower to begin with.

So when you walk past the well tomorrow and see the stones shining in the wet, look down. You will not find the boy. You will find his lily, gone soft at the edges, still open, still dropping its colour into the drizzle. Now, who wants the fish? It is half price, on account of the rain.