Black and grey engraving-style tattoo of a blueberry sprig with leaves on a forearm, with a cat below and a partly visible hedgehog to the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blueberry sprig, hedgehog and cat on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A sprig of blueberries with several leaves runs diagonally across the forearm, with a small seated cat drawn below it and a larger hedgehog partly cropped at the right edge. The work uses fine, engraving-style hatching and stippled shading in black and grey, giving the berries and leaves depth. The subjects are spaced across the arm on a plain light background.

Botanical Forearm Berry Leaves Sprig Cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine, and the slag heap is the only hill above Hollin Row that never gives up any fruit, so you climb the bracken path past the chapel wall to the ridge where the wind comes off the moor. Below you the winding gear turns over the pit like a slow clock. Your tin bucket knocks against your knee with every step. Your mother said to be home before the whistle, and the whistle is already somewhere in your teeth.

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A hedgehog is working the edge of the path, snuffling through the leaf litter, and it does not roll up when you crouch beside it. Mr Yarrow's cat, Tansy, sits on the wall with the patience of someone who has been told not to chase things. Neither of them seems to mind you. The bushes up here are low and crooked, and the berries hide under their leaves, dusted pale on top so they look like coal dust until you rub one and find the blue underneath. You break a sprig with five leaves and fill your bucket by thumbfuls, licking your fingers until your tongue goes dark.

The whistle goes while you are still picking. Down in the lane the shift men come up the hill in a line, black to the eyes, and your father is the last of them, carrying his snap tin like a lantern. He does not scold you when he sees the bucket. He tips a berry into his palm, rolls it on his tongue, and says the stain will be gone by Sunday, though he has never once in his life managed to get the pit off his own hands.

Years later you will find that sprig pressed flat inside his old timetable book, the blue still on the paper, faint as a bruise, long after the colliery has become a car park and the hedgehog has become a rumour.