Botanical tattoo of a large flower and a bud with olive green leaves, in soft grey shading, on a forearm.

Botanical flower and bud on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large flower with long, spiky petals dominates the forearm, with a smaller bud curling above it and two broad leaves below. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading across the petals and bud. The leaves are filled in muted olive green, while the rest of the design stays in greys and skin-toned highlights.

Botanical Forearm Flower Bud Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cactus on the wall of the priest's house had not opened in nine summers, and the village blamed Teodora, who had stopped climbing the ladder at dusk to tell it the news. She had her reasons. Her brother had gone down to the coast with the salt boats and had not written, and every evening she found she had nothing good to say.

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In the tenth year a bud showed at the top of the oldest joint, swollen and green as a plum. Teodora carried up a jug of water and sat on the top rung. She did not sing. She told it about the boats, the grey mornings, the gulls fighting over bread on the quay, and how her brother had once cut his name into the church door with a nail and been beaten for it. The bud did not move. She told it about the loaf she had burned that morning.

Near midnight the bud split along one seam and the petals came out like the long fingers of a hand unclenching, pale and spiked, too many to count. The whole street came out in nightshirts to look. The light from the flower was so strong that the priest read his breviary by it from across the square, and by the time the cocks crowed it had shut tight again as if it had been a dream.

Two weeks later a letter came off the coast boat, stained with brine, with a dried sprig folded inside. It said only that he was coming home on the first tide, and that he had seen a flower on a rock out at sea which opened for one night and nowhere else. Teodora read it sitting on the ladder. She did not climb down for a long while.