Botanical tattoo of a blackberry branch with purple berries, green leaves and thorny stem, with a white flower below, on an upper arm.

Blackberry branch on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A blackberry bramble branch runs up the arm, with clusters of purple berries, serrated green leaves and a thorny stem. Two white five-petalled flowers and a small bud sit at the left and lower edge of the design. The linework is dark and fine, with soft shading across the leaves and berries, and the design wraps around the arm.

Botanical Upper arm Blackberry Leaves Berry Flower Thorn Stem Bud

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

Hold still, the lamp's about to go, and I'll not tell it twice with the bins being emptied behind us. Down past the gasworks, where the railway runs under the ring road, there was a bramble that nobody planted. It came up through the cinders the year the signal box shut, and by August it had climbed the parapet of the old footbridge, flinging its long arms over the lamps as if it wanted to read the names on the bus stops.

Keep reading

Nell Ashby worked nights at the depot, sweeping out the buses after the last route came in. Every evening she walked the towpath home past that bramble, and every evening its stems had crept a little further along the railings. One night in September the berries came all at once, a hundred dark purple knots among the serrated leaves, shining wet under the sodium light. She filled a biscuit tin with them, and the thorns tore her sleeves to ribbons, and she didn't mind, because the bridge was the only place in the city that had ever asked her for anything and given something back.

At the stop by the footbridge a lad sat waiting for the 4.10, no coat, a bus pass he'd lost somewhere in the gutter. She didn't ask him a thing. She tipped the last cluster into his cupped hands, and the juice ran down his wrists like ink from a broken pen. He looked at his palms as if someone had written on them in a hand he didn't know.

The bus came, the lad climbed aboard, and Nell walked home with an empty tin and cinder dust on her fingers. Next morning the bramble had put out two white flowers at the foot of the bridge and a bud no bigger than a pea, as if it had already decided the city would need more berries before the week was out.