Colour tattoo of a branch with cream and red berries and green leaves in a botanical style, running down the forearm.

Berry and leaf sprig on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A branch of cream and red berries with green and dark brown leaves wraps across the arm and trails down towards the wrist. The berries are shaded with soft highlights and small dark marks, while the leaves have black outlines and layered tones. The palette is muted greens, reds and browns against pale skin, with a blurred dark background.

Botanical Traditional Forearm Berry Leaves Branch Sprig Foliage

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

The dog had already been waved through, and the man in the next lane was still arguing about his cigarettes, so I had the booth to myself when the woman put the sprig on my counter. Rowan, she said, before I could ask. Cut from a tree above a lock on the far side of the river. The stalks were drying at the cut ends, and the berries had gone the colour of old brick, pale on top and red underneath where the sun had not reached them.

Keep reading

I told her plant matter needed declaring. She agreed that it did. She said her mother had carried one across this same line in 1974, pinned inside a hymn book, and nobody had stopped her then either. I asked what the hymn book had been for. She said it kept the wrong people from opening a door, which I took as a joke until I looked at the leaves, serrated and set five to a stem, the same arrangement as the carving over my own mother's kitchen door in Carlisle.

I stamped the form and wrote NONE on the line. She folded the sprig into a handkerchief and went off towards the car park without looking back, the berries bobbing against her wrist like a row of small lanterns.

That evening I drove home by the old road and slowed at the crossroads where the tree had been planted. I found the lock in the verge, just as she had said, its trunk leaning and its bark silver with lichen. I pulled a single berry from the lowest branch and put it on the dashboard, where it stayed until spring.