Black and grey botanical tattoo with leaves, flowers and a vine on the upper arm and forearm, shown below a white short sleeve.

Black and grey botanical arm tattoo

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a person in a white knit top with a brown collar, with the face and head cropped out of frame. Black and grey tattoos cover the outer arm, with leaves, flower-like shapes and a curling vine, and a possible bird-like shape near the elbow. The shading is soft and the composition is a close, slightly angled crop of the torso and arm against a plain grey background.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Leaves Flower Vine Bird Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the pass for three days, and Mrs Dorrit had run out of patience before she ran out of firewood. Hettie Marsh stood in the scullery of the Hollin Arms with a sack of onions at her feet and listened to the kettle complain. Upstairs, the guest who had come up the valley on foot was still asleep, or pretending to be, and nobody had yet asked what he carried in the oilskin case.

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She found out at dusk, when she carried up the coal. The case lay open on the washstand. Inside, pressed between sheets of brown paper, were pages of fern and ivy, a sprig of holly gone the colour of stewed tea, and a single drawing of a bird with its wings half folded, as if it had landed on a branch and forgotten to leave. Hettie had grown up in the valley. She knew the ivy on the church wall and the bindweed that choked the lower field. She had never known anyone who kept a garden on paper.

'They're for my mother,' he said from the doorway, and she jumped, because she had not heard him wake. 'She can't go out now, so I bring the hedges to her.' He smiled as though it were a joke he had told many times. 'The bird I couldn't find anywhere. I drew it from memory.'

Hettie set the coal down. Outside, a robin had settled on the frozen sill, its breast bright against the drift, and it looked in at them both as if it had been asked to wait. She reached past him, took the holly from the case, and laid it on the page beside the bird. Morning would open the pass. Until then she pressed the leaf flat, and wrote the date beneath it in her careful hand.