Black and grey botanical tattoo of leaves, branches and flowers across a shoulder and upper arm.

Botanical flowers across a shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a shoulder and upper arm carrying a large botanical tattoo of leafy stems, drooping blossoms, a poppy-like flower and bare branches. The linework is fine and black, with hatching on the leaves and stippled shading on the stems, and the design wraps from the top of the shoulder down the outer arm. There is no colour ink, and the design fills the frame against plain skin and a pale wall.

Botanical Dotwork Shoulder Upper arm Flower Leaves Branches Poppy Blossom Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Harrowby Green the week the orchard died, and Ada Penrose walked the length of the field with a sack of dead dogwood over one shoulder. Nobody asked her what she meant to do with it. The showman, a long thin man called Mr Sallow, kept a booth of glass jars on a trestle, and in each jar something grew that had no business growing: heather rooted in a thimble of salt, a poppy that opened only after the lamps were lit.

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He looked at the branches and then at her. The wood was grey and split, and the leaves had gone to paper. He said he would take the sack and give her a jar in exchange, but she had to hear the terms first. Every spring, he said, she must walk out to the field and find one thing that had come back without being asked. She must not water it or warm it. If she did not find it, the jar would crack on the windowsill, and she would have to start again with a different sack.

Ada took the jar. It held a single orange poppy on a stem as fine as a hair, and the petals folded shut each morning like a hand closing. She set it on the sill and forgot the terms for a long while. The fair left and did not come back. The orchard stayed bare for three winters, and then, one April, a feathered leaf showed at the top of the old trunk, and a branch she had cut years before put out a cluster of white blossom from a split at its base. The poppies came up along the stone wall without anyone sowing them.

She still walks the field each spring with her collar up and her eyes down. Last year she found a dogwood bloom the size of a coin, pushed up through the cut stump, and she knelt there in the wet grass until the light changed. Then she went home and told the poppy on the sill, which had not yet closed, that its turn had come round again.