Colour tattoo of a blackberry bramble with purple berries, green leaves and thorny stems on an upper arm, in a botanical illustration style.

Blackberry bramble on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a blackberry bramble with several clusters of dark purple berries, serrated green leaves, a small white five-petalled flower and thorned stems. Fine dark outlines and soft shading give the leaves and berries a naturalistic, illustrative look. Colour is limited to muted greens, purples and touches of white, and the design wraps around the arm with a rose-like flower and more leaves continuing below.

Botanical Traditional Upper arm Blackberry Berry Leaves Flower Thorn Rose

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bramble had crossed the wire again by the first week of August, as it did every year, reaching over the boundary between Ruth Penhale's top field and the Ashdown land like a neighbour who had never once thought to ask. Ruth stood at the gate with a dented enamel bucket hooked over one wrist and looked at the clusters hanging on the far side. They were the fattest berries she had seen in years, black-purple and split with juice, and every one of them was out of reach.

Keep reading

Tom Ashdown came up the lane at half past seven with his secateurs in his back pocket and grievance in his jaw. He had been polite in the first letter and less so in the second, and she had kept both in the drawer under the tea towels. 'You're picking on my side,' he said. 'I'm picking on the wire,' Ruth said, 'and the wire is the one thing neither of us has ever paid for.' He laughed despite himself, then reached through the strands with a leather glove and bent a cane down so she could get at the top berries.

They worked without talking for a while. The thorns caught on her sleeve and his cuff. Low down, where the stems ran along the ground, a single white flower had opened among the leaves, five petals thin as paper, and a little further along a second bud was splitting its green sepals. He said his mother had called them dewberries, and she said her grandmother had called them the devil's spit, and both of them agreed that nobody's grandmother had ever been right about a hedge.

By nine the bucket was half full and the wire had been pushed down into the grass in one place where neither of them would admit to having done it. Ruth held a handful of berries out across the boundary. Tom took them, and his thumb came away purple, and when she looked at her own wrist she saw that the juice had run there too, into the fine creases of the skin, the same colour on both sides of the fence.