Back view of a person with a black and grey tattoo sleeve on the raised arm, showing clouds, leaves and floral shapes across the upper arm and forearm.

Black and grey arm sleeve seen from behind

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind, raising one tattooed arm against a wall of printed posters. The sleeve shows dark, shaded foliage, cloud-like forms and floral shapes across the upper arm and forearm, with grey tones and bold black outlines. The white sleeveless top with a printed storm scene is a separate garment and the tattoo is the focus on the arm.

Upper arm Forearm Sleeve Cloud Leaves Flower Shading

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The clouds came over the Wolds yesterday the way they always do in August, stacked up grey and then all at once, and I stood in the yard with the washing still pegged out and watched them split the sky above the orchard. You'd have laughed at me. I didn't go in. I wanted to see how the sorrel leaves turned over before the rain hit, silver side up, as if they'd been warned.

The dahlias came through better than I expected. Mrs Pargeter's bed by the wall took the worst of the wind, and three of the heavy red heads are lying flat in the gravel, but the shaded ones at the back held. I cut what was left and put them in the blue jug on the sill. The leaves on the damson are shredded at the edges, dark green going black where the water sat, and the roses along the shed have dropped half their petals in one night, pale pink scattered over the path like confetti from a wedding nobody came to.

I found the old almanac in the shed drawer, the one with your handwriting in the margins about frost dates. You wrote that the wind comes from the west when the cloud sits low, and I thought, well, Tom, you were right about something.

Come home for the harvest if you can. The apples are coming in heavy and I can't reach the top branches anymore. Bring your boots, the lane floods now. And bring back the ladder you borrowed in 1998. I've been meaning to say.

Love, Ruth