Black and grey botanical tattoo of a blackberry branch with serrated leaves and thorns, shown on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blackberry branch on an arm

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A branch of blackberries with serrated leaves and thin thorny stems wraps diagonally across the skin. The linework is fine and the berries are built up with dense stippling and soft shading to show their form. The image is black and white, with a blurred tattoo partly visible in the upper right background.

Botanical Other Blackberry Branch Leaves Thorn Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the kingdom of Harrowmere, the lane between the mill and the chapel was choked with bramble, and every autumn the miller's wife said the berries were not to be picked after Michaelmas, for the devil spat on them that night and they were no longer fit to eat. Her son Tobin paid it no mind. He was nineteen and thought the old sayings were for the old.

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On the feast day the lord's steward rode through with a cart and ordered the hedge cut back to the wall. Tobin, who had been sent to fetch rope, stood among the stems and found the fruit still black and heavy, so he filled his cap before the blades came down. He ate the first one sitting on the cart shaft, the juice running into his cuff. It tasted of rain, with something sour underneath, like a warning he had not been listening to.

That night the mill wheel stopped. In the morning the cap was empty, the brambles were gone, and his mother found a single thorned stem laid across the threshold, three serrated leaves on it and one berry still green. She did not say anything. She tied it to the lintel with red thread, and every year after, when the fruit came, she left one berry on the step for whoever might be hungry at the wrong time of year.