Black and grey botanical tattoo of roses, anemones and lily of the valley with leaves on the inside of a forearm.

Black and grey flower cluster on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of flowers runs up the forearm, including a large rose, an open anemone or poppy-style bloom, a dense ruffled flower and sprigs of bell-shaped blossoms with leaves. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and realistic, building depth in the petals and leaves. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey, set against a beige knitted sleeve and a dark skirt with a plain wooden background.

Botanical Realism Forearm Rose Flower Anemone Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ashdown wanted her wedding bouquet drawn rather than photographed. The photographer would make everything look left out in the rain, she said, and she wanted it kept the way it was on the morning. So I sat at my kitchen table with a 2B pencil and a box of stems that had come up from the market at five. A cabbage rose the colour of weak tea went down first. Then the anemone, with its dark heart that bruised at the edges if you looked at it too long. Lily of the valley last, because her husband's grandmother had carried it at her own wedding, and Mrs Ashdown wanted it at the top like a crown.

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The work took three days. I shaded the petals darker where the light fell away and left the paper bare wherever it caught. The ruffled bloom in the middle gave me the most trouble. It kept losing its edges until I stopped trying to count the frills and simply let the pencil go where the shadow told it to. Tom Marr, the groom, brought tea each afternoon and stood behind my chair without saying much. On the second day he asked whether the leaves would look right in grey. I said grey was all I had, and he nodded as if that settled something.

On the wedding day the real bouquet sat on the vestry table, and by evening its roses had gone soft and brown at the rims, just as I had said they would. The drawing was framed and hung by the door, so the family could see it on their way out. Mrs Ashdown told me afterwards that the anemone was the only bloom in the room that hadn't faded. I told her that was pencil for you. It was also the only thing I had made that day that would still look like itself in fifty years.