Black and grey botanical tattoo of a flowering stem with buds and leaves, with a small spider beside it, on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical flower stem on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall flowering stem with open blooms, closed buds and broad leaves runs the length of the forearm, with a small spider drawn beside the stem. The linework is dark and detailed, with shading in the petals and leaves that gives the flowers depth. The design is in black and grey ink and sits centrally on the arm against a dark wooden bench.

Botanical Forearm Flower Stem Bud Leaves Spider

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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

The seed order came aboard at Stoke Bruerne with the coal, two hundred paper packets tied in string, and my uncle Ansel swore he had counted every one. He had not counted the spider. It sat on the third bale when we cast off, a small grey thing the colour of wet ash, and it watched me the way a shopkeeper watches a child near the penny sweets.

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The cargo was snapdragon for a nursery outside Northampton, tall spikes with buds shut tight as fists, and the spider took to the stems as if it had been hired to guard them. At every lock it climbed a little higher up the mast post. Ansel said a spider aboard brings luck if you feed it and misfortune if you sweep it, so I fed it crumbs of ship's biscuit and kept my broom in the locker.

At Blisworth tunnel the bulbs flickered and then went out altogether, and when we came blinking into the light the nursery's letter was waiting at the lock keeper's hut. The man had died in March. Nobody would pay for the seed. Ansel wanted to tip the lot into the cut before the rot got into the coal. I asked for one stem, only one, and pressed it flat in my ledger between the pages for June while he was still swearing at the lock gate.

The flowers grow now in tin tubs along the roof, and the spider's grandchildren keep the bow locker. Each spring I open the ledger to that page. The pressed stem has gone the colour of weak tea, its little mouths closed, and beside it there is a single grey thread that no one has ever managed to brush away.