Colourful watercolour-style flower tattoo with pink, teal and orange petals and thin black linework on the inner forearm.

Watercolour-style flower on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large flower with pink, orange, teal and green petals sits on the forearm, with a dotted red and green centre and loose brushstroke-like washes. Fine black lines and small white accents trace the petals and a stem that runs down towards the wrist. The bright colour dominates and the composition is centred on the upper forearm against a pale tiled floor.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Flower Petal Stem Abstract Watercolour

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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 snow has sealed the lane below Hollin Cross since Tuesday, and by Thursday the inn's only guest is a woman who asked for the room over the kitchen and paid in coins. You are the one who carries her tea up the back stairs. Her paintbox sits open on the sill, the pans cracked and bright as boiled sweets: rose madder, cadmium orange, a green that looks like pond water in July.

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On the third morning she is gone. The bed is made tight, the pillow turned the way hotels teach you. Pinned flat under a teacup on the washstand is a single sheet of cartridge paper. A flower fills it, big as a dinner plate, its petals loose washes of pink and teal that bleed into the grain, with black ink lines running out like spokes from a wheel that has forgotten its rim. Down one side, a green stem drips toward the edge of the paper and stops.

You take it downstairs and prop it against the bar, where the fire has made the room smell of wet wool and oranges. The regulars look at it and say nothing, which is unusual. Old Ned from the mill, who has never looked at anything longer than his pint, leans in and says the stem is the only honest line on it, because it goes somewhere.

The road opens on Saturday. You never learn where she went. But when the plough finally grinds up from the valley, you find yourself scanning the lane for colour against the white, and you realise the snow has been bright all week, and you simply had not been looking.