Black ink botanical flash design of a branch with flowers and faceted leaves, drawn on a tan leather surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical branch line drawing on leather

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single branch runs diagonally up the page, bearing small five-petal flowers at the top and pairs of leaves along the stem. Some leaves are filled with fine hatching and geometric facets, while others use dotwork shading and open outlines. The design is drawn in black ink on a plain pale tan background, with two diamond-shaped areas left in the leather at the lower edge.

Botanical Dotwork Geometric Branch Leaves Flower Stem Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the mule track lifted above the last larches, the cutting had lost two leaves and I carried it the way my aunt carried eggs, one palm cupped beneath the other. The villagers at Corrach called the plant ghost sage, though it was no sage I knew. Its flowers had five pale petals, each as thin as wax paper, and its leaves had been grown into facets like cut stones in a jeweller's tray, some crosshatched fine as frost and others left open and speckled with dots.

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Mattias Brenn had given it to me at the foot of the pass in exchange for a tin of tobacco and a promise I had not yet decided whether to keep. 'Plant it out of the wind,' he said, 'and it stays the shape it was born with. Plant it in the open and it will learn the wind's shape instead.' He wrapped the stem in a strip of tanned hide and pressed his thumb on the two bare diamonds his wife had left in the leather, a mark she used on cuttings she meant to sell.

I did not plant it out of the wind. At the saddle, where the cairn stands and nothing grows but moss and stubborn grey stone, I wedged the roots into a crack that faced the gusts. The cold came off the snowfield like a blade. For a week I climbed up each morning expecting a brown stick. Then, on the eighth day, the leaves had turned their faceted edges to the sun and the flowers had opened all along the top of the branch, bent flat against the wind as if they had decided to hold on rather than hide.