Black and grey botanical tattoo of large blooms and leaves running up the inner forearm, photographed in a bright room.

Black and grey floral sleeve on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is covered with a black and grey tattoo of several large flowers, including a layered bloom at the centre and smaller open blossoms, with leaves and buds trailing down the arm. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading inside the petals and leaves. The design runs diagonally from the wrist towards the elbow, which is cropped out of frame, against a plain pale background.

Botanical Forearm Flower Bloom Leaf Bud Floral

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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

Dear Maud, the Queen's gardener has sent for me again, so I am writing from the cold room beneath the east gallery at Veldmoor, where the pressed specimens sit in drawers the colour of wet slate. You asked in your last letter whether the court still wants flowers drawn in ink now that paint is so much quicker. It does, because ink does not lie about the shadow a petal casts.

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This week I was given the Winter Peony of the Saltmarsh Gate, a bloom that opens only after the first frost and closes by noon. I drew it in layers, the heart first, then each ring of petals folded over the last, shading the undersides with a grey wash of soot and gum so the old frost would show through. The stem I let run down the page on a long diagonal, with buds set at intervals like knots in a rope. Lord Ashcombe thinks the buds unnecessary. I told him a plant that shows its face only once a year must have something to say about the rest of its life.

Yesterday the bloom shed its last petal while I was still working on the lower leaves. I finished them from memory, which is the only honest way, and the chamberlain carried the sheet away before the ink had properly dried. I have kept a copy of my own, and it is the only thing I have made in this place that I would take with me if the palace ever flooded.

Come and see it in the spring, when the marsh is green again. Bring your good pencils, and do not tell the Queen I said the peony was finer than she is.