Black and grey botanical tattoo of leaves, fern fronds and buds wrapping around a forearm just below the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical leaves and fern on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several broad leaves, a feathery fern frond and small buds on branching stems that curl across the forearm. The linework is fine and dark, with soft shading and stippled detail in the leaf veins and foliage. The design is entirely black and grey and is framed by the plain skin of the arm against a dark red top.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Leaves Fern Branches Bud Foliage Vine Stem

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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

Mind the stove, love, it spits when the wet gets in. Now, you want the story of the cuttings, and I'll tell it the way my father told it, which is slowly, because the canal has never once hurried for anybody.

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Forty years back, the barge Marigold carried nothing but seed and slips for a nursery outside Stourport. Leaf cuttings wrapped in damp sacking, rose stems bound with string, a crate of fern roots that smelled of cellars. Ada Pell kept the ledger and the cargo both, and she'd say a bud was a promise with the lid still on. At every lock she wet the sacking from a tin can, and she counted the cuttings twice, because the nursery man was a thief and she'd known him since they were children.

One night at Hopwood Lock the tow rope snapped and the Marigold drifted into the bank under a hanging bough of wild vine. Ada went out with a lamp in her teeth to fend us off, and when she came back her coat was full of broad leaves and a frond of fern was caught in her hair. She didn't say a word. She laid the frond across the cabin table and traced its outline with a burnt stick until the whole table was green-black with it, branch after branch curling toward the door.

The nursery never paid for the last crate. Ada said the cuttings had grown their own roots in the sacking and walked off the boat by themselves. I don't believe a word, but I've seen that vine on the towpath since, twisting up the old lock gate as neat as ink, and every spring I count the buds twice, the way she taught me.