Watercolour-style tulip tattoo in pink, red and orange with green leaf and stem on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tulip on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tulip in bloom sits at the top of a long stem with a green leaf and a curling green tendril, all on the outer forearm. The petals use soft, blended washes of pink, red and orange, with dark loose lines at the base of the bloom. The design is centred on a plain background of skin with soft, pale light falling across the arm.

Botanical Forearm Tulip Flower Leaf Stem Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the candle, Mabel, it's the last of the good tallow. Snow's up to the sills and the road over Carrick Pass won't see a cart before March, so you've my voice and nothing else to pass the night.

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Eighty years back, a bulb-seller called Tobias Greer came over that pass in November with a crate strapped to his back. Tulips from the Dutch merchants, he said, rare red and rose, the petals bleeding into one another like wet paint on a board. Nobody believed a flower could be made of water. He slept three nights in this very room, by that very hearth, the crate between his knees, and every morning he lifted the lid to check the bulbs, and every morning the frost had crept a finger's width further under the door.

On the fourth night the innkeeper's girl, Ada, a thin thing with chilblains, offered to sit with him. She asked what colour the flowers would be come spring. He told her the truth: he didn't know. They were only papery brown onions to look at. But he drew her a bloom on the back of a bill of fare, a cup of rose and orange with a green stem curling like a question, and she pinned it above the bar, where it still hangs, blackened by smoke.

The snow broke on the twentieth of March. Tobias took his crate down the pass and was never seen in these parts again. But the following April, when the meltwater ran down the lane, Ada went out to the old midden wall and found tulips standing in the mud, red as a tavern lamp, leaning towards the light as if they'd been waiting all winter for someone to notice them.