Black and grey botanical tattoo of a large flower with leaves and a stem, shaded in detail, on a person's forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey flower and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large open flower with several leaves and a thin stem runs diagonally across the forearm, with smaller buds at the lower end. The work uses fine linework with soft shading in black and grey, giving the petals and leaves depth and a vintage botanical illustration feel. The arm rests on a wooden floor beside an open book and a patterned teacup, which sit at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Realism Forearm Flower Leaves Stem Bud

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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 Winifred, I have pressed the enclosed sprig between two pages of Mrs Aldous's almanac, the one with the foxed corners, because you always said I could never keep a flower alive past a single Sunday. This one is a wild rose, or what my father's old Latin book calls Rosa pendulina, though the village calls it nothing at all. I found it on the bank below the mill sluice the morning the carrier took your trunk away, and it was already going brown at the edges, yet the bloom held its shape the way a good letter holds its folds.

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The mill has been silent since the spring. Mr Corby sold the wheel for scrap and the millrace has grown over with dock and meadowsweet, so you would not know the lane now. I walked it twice last week with the teapot you left behind, the cream one with the gilt rim, and I thought of the afternoon we sat on the sluice wall and you drew the stem for me on the back of a seed catalogue, every thorn and every bud, until the ink ran out and you finished it in pencil.

I have decided to go to London in September, to the botanical room at the museum where they keep the old plate drawings. I am told they need someone to clean the prints. It is not much, but the hands that clean them are the ones that learn to see the veins. Keep the teacup on the windowsill, if you have one. Write and tell me whether the roses there are as stubborn as ours.

Yours in green ink, Marjorie