Forearm with a botanical tattoo of a purple beetroot and leaves, held beside a real beetroot on a pavement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Beetroot tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm shows a tattoo of a beetroot with its stem and leaves, drawn with a fine outline and soft shading. The root and stems are in purple tones, while the leaves are muted green and brown. A real beetroot with its leafy tops rests on grey pavement beside the arm, and the hand holds it, which echoes the tattoo.

Botanical Forearm Leaves Stem Vegetable

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Hadlow Road allotments would admit to sowing the beetroot that came up through the council's bin store, but everybody knew whose it was. Mrs Ida Pardoe had put a row of Boltardy in every April since her husband went into the ground, and she did not waste seed on anything she was not prepared to fight for.

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The roots came on fat and dark that summer, the colour of a bruise going off. Lads from the flats came for the leaves and got a clip round the ear with a trowel. Ida boiled the roots in her kitchen, peeled them under the cold tap, and her fingers stayed crimson for a week, so that the postman asked if she had been in a fight, and she said only with the weeds.

In September the water board dug up the lane and flattened the bed by the shed. Ida went down on her knees in the spoil and dug until she found the biggest root, half out of the clay, its stalk still carrying three leaves like a flag. She wrapped it in a Co-op bag and walked the three streets to the church hall, where the allotment committee was voting on whether the bins would stay put.

She didn't speak. She set the beetroot on the trestle table between the raffle tins and the urn, took out her paring knife, and cut it cleanly through the middle. The juice ran across the minutes of the last meeting, over the words 'compost' and 'relocation', until neither could be read.

The bins moved to the far corner by Friday. Ida went home with the stained tablecloth folded under her arm, and the next spring there were two beetroot where the bin store had been, and nobody on the committee asked whose they were.