Black and grey botanical tattoo on an upper arm, with blossoms, leaves and a praying mantis in fine outline and dark leaf fills.

Blossom branch and praying mantis on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large botanical sleeve covers the upper arm, with apple or cherry-style blossoms, buds, serrated leaves and a branch running up towards the shoulder. A praying mantis with raised forelegs sits among the foliage, drawn in outline with light shading. The work is black and grey, with solid black fills on some leaves and fine hatching on others, arranged to wrap around the arm.

Botanical Upper arm Blossom Flower Leaves Branch Bud Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Ashdown Cross had ever seen a praying mantis on an orchard tree, so when the one on the old Bramley began lifting its forelegs at the pickers, my grandmother decided it was saying grace. Edith Vane was not a sentimental woman. She kept the bees, sold the windfalls by the sack and wrote the weather in a ledger with a pencil she sharpened with a penknife, but she would not let anyone spray that corner of the orchard.

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Her son Tom came up the lane in April with a canister on his back and a face like wet slate. The cherry blossom had come early and thick, white clusters pushed out along every branch, and the buds that had not opened yet were tight as knuckles. He said the mantis had been on the same twig for four days, eating whatever flew in, and that it would be the first thing to go when the blight came.

She made him wait. That night the wind dropped and the frost came down hard over the valley, the kind that blackens the hedges by morning. Edith went out at first light in her coat and found the twig furred white, every flower stiff, but the mantis was still there, pale green gone grey, arms folded close to its body. Only the bud beside it had survived, one tight pink knot untouched.

Tom stood at the gate with the canister and did not lift it. Edith took the penknife from her pocket, cut the frosted blossom from the branch below the bud, and left the rest standing. In October she counted the fruit and found the tree had kept one apple from the whole limb, small and red, sitting exactly where the mantis had been holding its grip.