Black and grey botanical tattoo of large flowers and leaves wrapping the inner forearm, shown on a person wearing a dark blue patterned top.

Black and grey flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several large open flowers, possibly peonies or camellias, with layered petals and broad leaves, plus small sprigs of foliage near the top. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading inside the petals and leaves to give them depth. The design is in black and grey only and runs up the forearm, with the flowers spiralling down toward the wrist.

Botanical Forearm Flower Peony Leaves Sprig Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the lane before anyone in Hollin Vale was awake, so Mabel Thorne went out with her boots unlaced and no lantern, because old Gerta at the mill had told her the camellias at the forest's edge only opened for someone who came early and asked nothing. Mabel had never asked anything of anyone. She was not about to start with a tree.

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The trees gave way to a clearing where the bushes stood taller than a man, their leaves broad and dark as wet slate, and the blooms hung heavy, layered like folded letters. Every petal had a shadow tucked inside it, grey as ash. She counted them and found an odd number, which Gerta had also warned her about. A fox sat on the root of an oak and watched her take her bread knife to a single stem below the lowest flower. "One," she said aloud. "I'm taking one." The fox yawned and looked away, which she chose to take as agreement.

Back in the village she set the bloom in a jar on the sill of the cooper's cottage, where his daughter had been sitting up three nights with the fever. Each morning another petal had loosened and the shadows inside them had gone soft. By the sixth day the cooper was asking for bread and the flower was bare, its leaves curled like paper left too near a grate. Mabel's hands had gone quiet with the work.

In March she found a green shoot coming up from the wet ground behind the cooper's wall, where she had tipped the spent stem. It had two leaves and a sprig of tiny buds. She left it where it was, and every morning after, she stood at the wall and waited for it to open.