Black and grey botanical tattoo of a dahlia, a rose and leaves running up a forearm, with soft shading.

Black and grey flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large dahlia-style bloom, a rose or peony at the lower left and several leaves on thin stems, with a partial bud at the top edge. The linework is dark and clean, and the petals and leaves are shaded in graduated greys to suggest depth. The design wraps diagonally up the forearm against a softly blurred background.

Botanical Forearm Dahlia Rose Flower Leaves Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming off the river for three days, so the stallholders at Castle Row market had stopped pretending anyone would stop to look. I kept the dahlias under the awning where the drips could not reach them, grey-black heads packed tight as cabbages, because Dad always said a dahlia would sulk for a week if it got wet. He also said they were show-offs, all ruffle and no sense, and I had liked them for exactly that.

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Walter Pryce came up the steps at eleven with his collar turned up and asked for 'the rose, the proper one, not the grocer's.' I told him the proper ones were in Eddie Marr's van and Eddie would charge him double. He laughed the way men laugh when they have already decided to pay. He wanted six stems of the dark ones, the kind that looked nearly black when wet. I wrapped them in yesterday's Gazette, the way Dad did, and he held the bundle against his coat like something that might spill.

He said his sister had kept a rose in every room of a house in Hessle, and the house was being sold on Monday. He wanted the last one she grew to be something she could carry out with her. I did not ask anything else. I took his coins, counted them twice, and found I had given him a dahlia by mistake, wrapped in with the roses, its ruffled head nodding over the newsprint.

After he left I found a single bud caught in the bottom of the bucket, closed tight and green at the edges. I set it in a jam jar on the counter with a splash of water. By four the rain had stopped, the light came low across the cobbles, and the bud had opened one petal, just enough to show what it had been keeping to itself.