Black and grey botanical tattoo of poppies, chrysanthemum and sprigs running along the inner forearm, in a fine line style.

Botanical flower bouquet on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bouquet of flowers runs diagonally down the inner forearm, including two large poppy-like blooms, a chrysanthemum-style flower, a cluster of small blossoms and leafy sprigs. The linework is fine and clean, with stippled dotwork shading in the petals and leaves that gives soft grey tones. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a red brick wall, with a grey fabric sleeve at the right edge.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Forearm Flower Poppy Chrysanthemum Bouquet Leaves Sprig Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The poppies had already started dropping their petals by the time Nell Harrow carried the basket up the lane, so she knew she had until the coach passed the mill to get them onto paper. Her father always said a poppy was a flower with no patience, and he was right. Every bloom she cut opened a little wider in the warm air, then folded its papery skirts and let go of the light.

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She laid the stems across the kitchen table and worked by the window, dipping her pen in iron-gall ink. The big blossoms went first, their crumpled petals built up from hundreds of small dots, because she could not find the softness any other way. Mrs Dorning's chrysanthemums came over the garden wall in a stone jug, bronze and shaggy, and Nell set them beside the poppies and found they argued with each other in a way she liked. The sprigs of rue and the little clustered blossoms she left for last, where the ink was thinnest.

By the time the coach horn sounded at the bottom of the hill, the flowers in the basket had gone limp and grey at the edges. The drawing did not. She rolled it carefully in oilcloth and pushed it inside her coat, and when the coachman asked what she was carrying she said only that it was a bouquet, which was true enough.

Her father would have frowned at the stippling and called it fussy. Still, she thought, a bouquet that could be posted was better than one that could not, and she sealed the tube with red wax. Three weeks later a letter came back from the city with a single line on it, asking whether she could draw another.