Black and grey botanical tattoo on a forearm, shown beside a sketchbook page with floral hand lettering in black ink.

Botanical forearm tattoo beside floral lettering

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand holds a black pen above an open sketchbook page, which carries hand-lettered text in black ink on cream paper, framed by a dense border of flowers and leaves. A black and grey tattoo of leaves and a mushroom-like shape wraps around the forearm at the left edge, with fine shading and linework. The bright, soft light and white bedding sit behind the page, and the focus is on the drawing.

Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Mushroom Pen Quote

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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 ranunculus go under the van wheels before you have finished saying sorry, and by the time you have picked the last stem out of the gutter the foreman has already chalked your name on the board with a line through it. You walk out from under the railway arches in Digbeth with your collar up and your hands jammed in your pockets, past the shuttered cafés and the lamp-lit hoardings, repeating the three things you have been telling yourself since you were nine. None of them help. By the time you reach the canal at Gas Street basin your feet have carried you in a circle and the water is the colour of old pewter.

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A bench sits under a plane tree whose roots have heaved the paving into little plates. Between two of them a ring of pale mushrooms has pushed up overnight, caps no bigger than thumbnails, gills fanned like the pleats of a good skirt. Nobody planted them. Nobody apologised to the tree for the crack. You sit down, pull the sketchbook from your bag, and start drawing them because your hands need something to do that is not gripping the phone and rereading the message.

The pen goes faster than you expect. Each cap you draw is smaller than the last, and you stop trying to make the lines perfect, letting the ink pool where it wants to and blotting nothing. A sodium streetlight buzzes. A cyclist passes, then a woman with a dog that sniffs your boot and loses interest. The sky over the Rotunda turns from black to slate.

When the first bus sighs at the stop across the road, you look down and find a fern frond in the corner of the page that you do not remember drawing. The mushrooms look as if they have been there all along, neither apologising nor asking for it. You close the book, shoulder the bag, and walk to the depot.