Four photographs of a black and grey botanical tattoo of soft, translucent flower blooms and stems with ink splashes, sitting on the upper arm and shoulder.

Black and grey flowers across upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows several flower blooms on stems, including open, bell-shaped and bud-like forms, drawn with soft, loose linework and fading grey shading that gives a translucent effect. Dark ink accents define the stamens and petal edges, while scattered ink splashes sit between the flowers. The four panels show the same piece from different angles, with the blooms wrapping across the upper arm and shoulder.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Flower Bloom Lily Stem Bud Ink splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the fair came over the hill road to Tallow Bottom with its painted wagons and a canvas booth where a man sold cuttings. Nobody remembered his name, only that he wore grey gloves and that his flowers never came from any garden in the county. Old Mab Hollin bought a bell-shaped bloom from him for a penny, its petals so thin she could see the church clock through them.

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She planted it by the well. By Candlemas it had climbed the wall and spilled over the eaves, its stems pale as ink washed off a brush, and every morning a grey splash of something like spilt water lay on the cobbles beneath. Her son Tom said it was rot. She said it was the fair's dust, which settles where it likes and grows what it pleases.

The next October the wagons came back, but the cutting man was not in his booth. A girl in a blue shawl sat there instead, selling buds shut tight as fists. Mab went to look. The girl asked for nothing but the tallest lily from the well wall, and said the stems had been promised to whoever brought the first one over the hill. Mab said she had paid a penny. The girl said a penny was all the fair ever took, and that the debt ran on, not the flower.

Mab cut the bloom that night and carried it to the booth herself. In the morning the well wall was bare, and the cobbles held a scatter of ink-dark drops, each one opening very slowly into a bell. Tom swept them into the gutter. By spring they had come up through the cracks between the stones, and nobody in Tallow Bottom ever bought a cutting from the fair again.