Woman seen from behind with black and grey botanical sleeve tattoos covering her upper arms and forearms, standing before a misty waterfall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical and feather sleeves, waterfall backdrop

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose bun is photographed from behind, facing a misty waterfall in a green forest. Her left arm carries a shaded tattoo that appears to show feathers or wings across the shoulder and upper arm, and her right arm has leaf and foliage linework with soft grey shading. The ink is black and grey, and the wide composition places her and the waterfall centrally against the foliage in the foreground.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Shoulder Woman Leaves Feather Forest Mist Foliage Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mist didn't lift until nearly ten, which Sorrel said was the only honest hour the falls had all day. I sat on a flat rock with my tin of pressed specimens open on my knees and tried to write down what I could see before it changed. Fern, rata, a bird I could hear but not find.

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Sorrel had been cutting a path up the gully for three days, and she never once looked at the water when she spoke to me. She looked at the leaves. She would take a frond between two fingers, turn it to the light, and tell me which way the wind had come in spring. I wrote it all down. Nobody in Bristol would believe a nursery could be built on a guide's reading of leaves, but the seedlings we shipped home lived, and that was the only argument my employers ever respected.

On the last morning a feather came down through the spray and caught on the wet bark by my boot. Long, grey-barred, nothing like the pheasants at home. Sorrel crouched but didn't pick it up. She said the bird that dropped it had likely been watching us the whole week. I laughed. She didn't.

I left the feather where it was. I pressed a single leaf instead and labelled it with the name of the falls, which I still cannot spell with confidence, and the date. When the crate reached the glasshouse in March, that label was the only thing in it I had written myself that nobody needed to correct. The leaf is still in the drawer.