Black and grey botanical tattoo sleeves on both upper arms of a person wearing a white crop top printed with lips, cats and lipsticks.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey floral sleeves with patterned crop top

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photograph of a person's torso and upper arms, with the face out of frame. Both arms carry large black and grey tattoos with shaded floral and leaf forms, with soft greyscale shading and fine detail. The white crop top has a repeated print of black lips, cat faces, lipsticks and painted nails, which contrasts with the tattoos.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Flower Leaves Sleeve Lip Cat Lipstick

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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

The frost has come early to Hollin Pass, and by the time you reach the cairn the gentians have gone the colour of pencil lead. Your grandmother's tin of watercolours is in your pack, but it is useless now. Every bloom on the scree is black at the throat and silver at the edge, the way a bruise looks after a week. You kneel and set down the sketchbook anyway, because the shepherd's boy at Carrow said the flowers come back to whoever draws them first.

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You draw the rock-jasmine rosettes, then the dock leaves curling at the edge of the snowmelt, and you shade each one with the side of a soft pencil until the paper goes dark where the petals fold. A wind comes off the col and turns the pages. You do not look up for a long time. When you do, the shepherd's collie is sitting in the gap in the drystone wall with its head tilted, watching you the way a cat watches a dropped spool.

The boy comes up at dusk with a lantern and a paper bag of oatcakes. He looks at your sketches and says nothing, then turns to a blank sheet and folds it into a cone, the way his mother folds sugar. Inside, he has tucked a single root cutting pulled from the verge. "Plant that where the snow stops," he says. "It only takes in the grey."

Next spring you climb back up, certain it will have died. Instead there is a clump of pale stems pushing through the shale, each leaf ruled in fine dark lines like your own shading, and the flowers are the blue of a sky you had forgotten. You kneel, open the sketchbook, and draw nothing at all. Some things only need looking at.