Colour botanical tattoo of a blackberry branch with green leaves and ripe and unripe berries on the upper arm.

Blackberry branch on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a bramble branch sits on the outer upper arm, showing several dark purple-black blackberries, one red unripe berry, serrated green leaves and thin brown stems. The leaves and berries have soft shading and fine vein detail, giving a naturalistic botanical look. The design is set against a plain grey top and a pale wall, with the arm slightly angled across the frame.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Blackberry Branch Leaves Berry Stem

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 crossed the old motorway in the third summer after the rains stopped, and by autumn it had climbed the gantries and hung its stems over the lanes like washing. Maud Okonedo, who kept the seed store at Lower Ashby, said it was the first thing since the old world that grew without asking anyone's leave. Her grandson Tobe thought she meant the hedgehogs, which had also come back, and said so, and she clipped him round the ear with a handful of dried chard.

Keep reading

Every child in the village was sent to the bramble with a tin on a string, and every child was given the same rule. Take the black ones, leave the red, and always leave the last cluster on a stem for the birds and whoever came after. Tobe broke the rule in July and ate a hard red berry that tasted like a bitten coin. Maud did not scold him. She said the red ones only sulk on the bush. They ripen on the walk home if you keep them warm against your ribs.

The northern traders came in September with a mule and a cart of salt, and they wanted blackberries pressed for ink, a sack of them, by the next market. Tobe saw the price and went out with a bucket before first light and stripped the south hedge bare, thorns through his sleeves, purple to the elbows. By noon the tin was full and the bucket was full and his forearms were scored like paper. He carried the sack up the lane whistling, and the salt was good salt.

That night the bramble came down across the lane, thick as a wrist and hooked all along its length, and nothing would cut through it before the cart left. Maud stood at the gate with a lamp and said nothing for a long time. In the morning Tobe walked out with his knife to see the damage and found, on the one stem he had missed, a single berry swelling dark as a bruise. He left it where it was. It was the only thing on the hedge that was ready.