Black ink botanical tattoo of a stylised flower and leaves inside a dotted circle, on a person's calf.

Black botanical flower on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised flower with a five-petalled bloom sits at the top of a long stem with paired leaves and small seed-like dots. A ring of dots encircles the motif, and the stem tapers to a single line at the base. The design is solid black linework with dotwork detail, shown against pale skin and a corrugated metal wall.

Botanical Dotwork Calf Flower Leaves Stem Dot Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin roof of the Corn Exchange ticked as the band packed up, and Nell Garrow counted the paper twists still in her apron pocket. Eleven left from the morning's sale. Her uncle had sold the rest of the seed to the drovers before the dance, but she had kept back the blue packet with the hand-drawn flower on it, five petals opening at the top of a stem that thinned to a single pen line at the bottom.

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Eddie Marr, who played the fiddle with the wrong hand on the fast tunes, came across the floor with two cups of cordial. "You've been looking at the wall all night," he said. "It's the only thing in here that isn't moving." She laughed and asked if he wanted to know what was in the packet. She told him it was a flower that only opened after dark, and that her grandmother had drawn a ring of dots around it so the wind would know where to stop.

Outside, the yard was wet and the air smelt of coal smoke. Nell knelt by the drain where the gravel met the grass and tipped the seeds out in a curve, one dot at a time, the way she'd been taught to space the border bulbs. Eddie held the lantern over her shoulder. The light caught the small black seeds and made them look like punctuation on wet stone.

Next spring, she told him, there would be a stem to mark the place. He didn't believe her, and she didn't mind. It was enough to have a reason to come back to the hall on a Saturday, and a patch of ground that might yet remember what it had been given.