Flash sheet of black ink botanical designs, including ferns, leafy sprigs and berry stems, on white paper beside fresh greenery and a brush.

Black ink botanical flash sheet with ferns and sprigs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A sheet of loose black ink drawings of ferns, leafy sprigs, berry stems and small branches, arranged across white paper. The linework is brushed and varied, with some marks solid and others speckled or feathered. The image is monochrome and shows the sheet on a pale surface beside fresh green foliage, an antler and two paintbrushes.

Botanical Fern Sprig Leaf Branch Berry Stem Foliage Ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Hollis wanted the bracken drawn before the frost took it, so I was up on Gorse Common by six with a jar of Indian ink wedged in my coat pocket and the two sable brushes Father left me. The ink had thickened in the cold. I thinned it with a little spit, the way he taught me, and started with the fronds nearest the path, where the dew made them shine.

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Down in the village the seed catalogue still arrived each Thursday, and Mr Hollis still paid a shilling a sheet for anything I drew that didn't look like a child's work. He liked the sprigs best. He said anyone could draw a fern with patience, but a berry stem had to look as if it had been bent by a wind that was about to stop. I thought of that as I dragged the brush down the page, letting it skip where the paper was rough and flicking off a dark dot of berries where the stem gave way.

By nine the sun was on the hedge and my fingers were black to the second knuckle. Peggy from the post office came past with her basket and stopped to look over the gate. She said I'd never sell a thing with so much empty paper. I told her the spaces were where the light went. She laughed and carried on up the lane.

When I took the sheet in that afternoon, Mr Hollis held it to the window and said nothing for so long that I began to tuck my hands into my sleeves. Then he tapped one small sprig at the edge, the only one I had drawn without looking, and said that was the one he would frame. It had been the last mark before my brush ran dry. I did not tell him the ink had run out there on purpose, or that I had been thinking of Father coming down the lane in February with the first green things in his hands.