Black and grey botanical tattoo of a flower bouquet with dotwork shading on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bouquet of flowers and leaves runs up the forearm, with two large blooms at the centre, smaller clustered blossoms, and feathered leaves at the lower left. The linework is fine and the petals and leaves are shaded with stippled dots and short hatching. The tattoo is entirely black and grey on pale skin, set against a dark sleeve and a brick wall.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Flower Bouquet Leaves Blossom Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mab Thorley had kept the walled garden on Quarry Lane for forty years, and every spring she told the village that a bouquet cut in the wrong month would sour the whole street. So when young Edwin Parr came to her gate in March with his hands in his pockets and asked for flowers, she looked him up and down and said he would have to earn them.

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The task was to fetch seed of the grey anemone from the far side of Cold Mere, where nothing grew but reed and wind. Edwin went. He crossed the causeway with a sack and a spade, and three days later he came back with his boots black to the ankle and nothing in the sack but a handful of wet soil and one dry pod that rattled like a dropped coin.

Mab split the pod on her step and shook out seeds no bigger than gnats. "You didn't bring me flowers," she said. "You brought me the road back." She pressed them into the bed under the south wall and hummed the tune her mother had hummed over the beans. By June the anemones stood up pale and proud, their centres dark as a thumbprint, and the clustered blossoms had climbed the bricks beside them as if they had always meant to.

Edwin cut the largest bloom and a sprig of the small white flowers and carried them up the lane to his mother's grave at St Ethel's, where the wall was low and the sky went on for miles. He laid them down and stayed there a long while. Mab, watching from her gate with the shears still in her hand, saw the wind lift the feathered leaves at his feet and set them down again, and she went back inside to cut the rest of the June roses.