Black line-work tattoo of several open flowers, leaves and buds climbing up the inside of a forearm, in a botanical style.

Botanical flower cluster on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of open five-petalled flowers, possibly poppies or wild roses, with a central stamen and dense shading at the centres. Smaller buds, a slender stem and several leaves trail up the forearm in a loose diagonal, with the largest bloom near the lower middle. The work is done in black ink with fine outlines and soft grey shading on the petals, and the plain dark background keeps the forearm as the clear focus.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Flower Poppy Rose Leaves Bud Stem

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the fire, for this is the tale of Orla Vennick and the poppy-garden of Sallowmere, which lay on the far side of the Grey Marsh where no cart-road ever went. Her mother kept the seed-cellar under the bell tower, and every spring the cellar door stuck, so Orla had to put her shoulder to it and push, the way you would push a bad-tempered goat. One morning in the thaw she found the door already open and a line of wet footprints leading out across the flagstones, small and bare, and the footprints belonged to no one in the town.

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She followed them through the mill-race and over the stile, past the widow Haddow's bean rows, until the path gave out in a tangle of wild roses and red-stemmed poppies that had no business growing on a marsh. At the centre of the tangle a girl sat with her knees drawn up, sorting seed into a cracked clay bowl. Her hands were green to the wrist. She did not look up. She only said, "You'll want to take the big one, the one nearest the water. It's the only bloom that's finished. The rest are still deciding whether to open."

Orla took the largest bloom, which came away in her palm with a soft sound like a held breath let go, and when she turned back the path was gone and so was the girl, and the bowl of seed had become a stack of dry leaves trembling in the wind. She carried the flower home. It was only when she set it on the cellar step that she saw its petals had curled, every one, the way a sleeper curls round a hot stone, and that the centre was a small dark knot of seed, tight and patient, waiting for the next thaw to remember it.