Black and grey botanical tattoo on an upper arm showing a flower, leaves, blackberries and a fern frond, shaded with stippled dotwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical flowers, blackberries and fern on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an upper arm with a botanical tattoo running from the shoulder area down towards the elbow. The design includes a open flower with leaves, a cluster of blackberries, a serrated leaf and a tall fern frond, drawn in fine outlines with stippled dotwork shading. The image is tightly cropped on the arm against a blurred dark background, with a sleeveless top visible on the torso.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Flower Leaves Blackberry Fern Berry Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Berwick lifts the jar from the glovebox of your van and holds it up to the strip light, as if the blackberries inside might confess. Seven years of hedgerow, steeped in brandy and labelled in your mother's looping hand. A fern frond pressed flat between two sheets of kitchen roll. At the lay-by you told yourself nobody checks jam.

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"Fruit preparations," he reads from the form. "Any plant matter at all?"

You think of the lane above the Tweed where the brambles grow thickest in September, where your mother once stood you on the wall and said the berries ripen from the inside out. It is the sort of thing a mother says to keep a child still. You want to tell him that. Instead you say the fern came from a field gate you didn't own, that it is for a friend in Lyon who keeps ferns in terracotta pots on her balcony, and that you are sorry.

He sets the jar down without opening it. He stamps the form, slides it back across the counter, and nods at the van's dented wing. The rain has started, thin and grey, the sort that gets into the seams of everything.

"Mind the brambles on the far side," he says. "They're worse in France."