Black and grey line tattoo of a beetroot with its leaves on a forearm, held over leafy greens in a garden bed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Beetroot tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a beetroot with long leaves and a curled stem, drawn in dark outline with soft grey shading across the bulb. A forearm and hand hold leafy green plants in a garden bed, with bare soil and more plants behind. The black and grey palette and simple composition keep the tattoo as the clear focus against the greenery.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Leaves Stem Plant

Find an artist for this

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

Mrs Ivy Partridge had grown the same beetroot for thirty-one years, and every August the judges at the Little Wenlow show found some fault with it. Too wide at the shoulder. Too pale at the crown. Once a steward swore it had been pulled from a supermarket bag and polished. This year Ivy sat on the bench behind the marquee with a flask of tea and waited for Dennis Coyle to finish fussing over his onions.

Keep reading

Dennis had won the trophy every year since his wife died, and he had a habit of standing too close to other people's entries. When he wandered over to the root table and lifted her beetroot to the light, Ivy did not stop him. She watched his thumb press the skin, the way it always did, hunting for a soft patch, a secret.

"Lovely," he said, which was how she knew he was rattled. He set it down a finger's width off its place card.

She had grown it in the lean strip by the compost heap, where the soil ran sour and the blackbirds dug. The secret had never been the soil. It was the walk she took out there in the dark with a torch and a cold cup of tea, talking to the row as if it were a choir that needed encouragement. When the rosettes were read out, her beetroot took second. Dennis took first with his onions, and he shook her hand as though he had won something from her. She let him. Walking home, she stopped at the lane gate and laughed until she had to hold the bars, because nobody in that marquee knew about the fat little root she had been saving in a cold frame, already split and sprouting, for next year's seed.