Colourful watercolour-style wildflower sleeve tattoo covering the upper arm and forearm, with purple, orange and yellow blooms and loose black grass strokes.

Watercolour wildflower sleeve on arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and forearm with a column of wildflowers, including purple and orange blooms at the top and larger red, white and yellow flowers near the elbow and wrist. Fine black stems and grass strokes run through the design, with loose splashes of blue, pink and yellow ink that give a painted, watercolour effect. The photo shows the sleeve from a close, front-on angle, with the same arm repeated side by side and the person's face and head cropped out of frame.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Flower Wildflower Daisy Poppy Grass Splashes Sleeve Stem

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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

Dearest Hester, the bottle of gum arabic cracked in the swell off Cape Horn, so the ink on my last sketches has run into itself like a bruise, and I find I do not mind. The purple cornflowers look as though a wind is blowing them sideways, a wind that does not exist. Captain Rowe calls it spoilt work. I call it the sea finishing what I began.

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We have been three months out of Falmouth with a hold full of cuttings wrapped in wet sacking, and the men have taken to bringing me weeds from every port. Yesterday it was a scrap of yellow poppy from a Tristan fisherman's wife, pressed flat as a playing card. I painted it that evening by the lamp, dabbing pink and blue where the spray came through the skylight, and drew the stems in black with a single hair from the brush, quickly, the way you taught me to cut a hedge.

The cook, a man called Abel Mott, came down to look and asked why I did not paint the flowers their proper colours. I told him the proper colours were what the eye forgets by the second day. He laughed and said his wife in Penzance had worn one yellow dress for thirty years and still wore it faded. Then he fetched me a daisy from the galley window box. I had thought it dead, but it was not. Its petals had curled white at the edges where the frost had bitten them.

I have pinned the daisy to the page beside the others, and when the light comes through the port in the morning it throws their shadows across the paper in blue and orange, so the whole sheet looks like a garden someone has walked through in a hurry. Write to me at Valparaíso, care of the consul. Tell me whether the crocuses came up, and do not tidy the beds for me.