Black and grey botanical tattoo of a blackberry vine with leaves and berries wrapping across the outer forearm, with an open hand extended in front of a blurred interior.

Blackberry vine on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A trailing vine of blackberries with serrated leaves and several clusters of fruit runs diagonally up the outer forearm. The linework is fine and detailed, with the leaves and berries built up through soft grey shading and dark accents. The image is in black ink only, with the arm photographed against a blurred indoor background and the open hand in the foreground.

Botanical Realism Forearm Blackberry Vine Leaves Berry Plant

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

Mrs Adair had been warning us since June that the brambles would not wait for anybody, and by the last week of September the hedge along Cold Harbour Lane had turned from green to a sour, bruised purple. The village boys were already fighting over the top rungs of the ladder propped against the cattle gate, so Nell and I went down with two baskets and a tin pail before the rain came in.

Keep reading

Nell would not eat a single berry once Michaelmas had passed. Our grandmother swore the devil walked the lanes on the twenty-ninth and spat on every bush still fruiting, and Nell believed her as readily as she believed the kettle would boil. I did not believe it, but I kept my tongue from the fruit all the same and filled my basket with the glossy black ones that hung low where the leaves had gone ragged and grey.

By four o'clock our wrists were striped with scratches and the pail was heavy as a stone. Nell knelt in the ditch and reached for one last cluster that dangled over the water, and it came away in her fingers with a sound like a wet thread breaking. She held it up to the light, looked at me, and then pressed it against the gatepost, leaving a smear of juice the colour of an old bruise.

"For him," she said. "Let him have his share."

We walked home in the dusk with the baskets knocking against our hips. Next morning the post was dry and the smear had faded to a pale ghost, but the bramble on the far side of the lane had sent a new shoot clean across the ditch, and it bore one green leaf, already toothed like a saw. Nell pretended not to see it. I did not pretend.