Black ink botanical tattoo of leaves and sprigs on an upper arm near the elbow, with a person lying on blue and white bedding.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical foliage tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of leaves, slender branches and small berry-like forms spreading outwards in a loose arc. The linework is fine and dark, with soft shading and stippled texture within the foliage. The image is in black and grey tones against a pale skin tone and a blue and white patterned bedsheet, with a partial view of a person's ear and hair at the right edge.

Botanical Upper arm Leaves Foliage Branches Sprig Berry Dot Botanical

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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

You are the one who has to unpack the crates, because your uncle's knees have given up on the cold. The market on Gallowgate opens before light, and by seven the awnings sag with rain and the cobbles shine like wet slate. You set out the trays of bare-root cuttings in their damp moss, label them in your uncle's cramped capitals, and wait for the first customer who wants something other than cabbages.

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The woman who comes at half past eight wears a grey coat and carries a folded paper bag, and she does not look at the ferns. She wants something that will climb a wall it has no business climbing. You offer wild clematis and a bundle of bramble tips still beaded with rain, and she shakes her head at both. Then she opens the bag and shows you a sprig she has clearly carried for weeks: a slender stem of leaves gone papery at the edges, a scatter of small round seed heads like pale beads, and one shoot that has split and rooted in a jam jar of water on her windowsill.

You tell her it is nothing you have on the trays, and she tells you it is nothing she can name. You both bend over it under the dripping awning, turning the stem to the light, and you find a node where a new leaf is folding out like a fist opening. You pinch it clean, dip the cut in the grey powder from the tin under the counter, and press it into a plug of compost. She pays in coins warm from her pocket and asks you to label it, so you write nothing you can be sure of: rooted, unnamed, from a windowsill on Ridley Street.

When she has gone, the rain keeps on, and you wrap the rest of the sprig in yesterday's newspaper and tuck it inside your coat. By the time the stall is packed up you have half decided to plant it by the back gate, where nothing has grown for years, and to see what it makes of the wet.