Black outlined blossom flowers with soft pink and brown shading run up a forearm in a botanical style tattoo.

Blossom flowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two large open flowers with layered petals and stamens sit one above the other along the forearm, with a smaller bloom and scrolling foliage below. The linework is bold black, and the petals are shaded with soft grey and pinkish-brown tones that give them depth. The design fills the forearm vertically, with the flowers dominating the upper and middle sections.

Botanical Forearm Flower Blossom Petal Stamen Scrollwork Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mari had counted the frosts since the first of March, and by the fourth morning the blossom on the old cherry at the Tollgate had gone the colour of weak tea. Her uncle wanted it cut back for the new carriage road. She said nothing, climbing the stone steps with a pail of lime wash and her father's grafting knife wrapped in oilcloth.

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The pass was a mile of switchbacks above Hollin Water, where the wind came down off the scree and worked into every seam. Travellers stopped at the inn for a bowl of broth and a look at the tree, which had been planted, so the story went, by a surveyor who promised his wife he would come back for her in spring and never did. Mari had heard the tale so often she could recite the wife's name, Ada, and the exact weight of the bell she rang each evening from the gatehouse.

On the fourth morning a boy came up the road with a letter that had been soaked and dried so many times the ink had bled into the paper like watercolour. It was addressed to the tollkeeper. Inside were four lines and a sprig of pressed blossom, five petals, one stamen still stiff with pollen. Mari read it twice on the step, then folded it back along its creases.

She didn't cut the tree. She took the knife to the lower branch instead, where a fork had split, and bound it with strips of linen so the sap could heal over the wound. By noon the wind had dropped and the petals were settling on the lime wash like snow that refused to melt. Ada's bell rang once, unbidden, as if someone at the top of the pass had given it a shake.