Black linework botanical tattoo of branching leaves and flowers across a shoulder and upper arm, shown from behind in a striped top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical sleeve on shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with branching stems, fern-like leaves and several large flower heads, including a peony-like bloom and a bulbous bud. The work is drawn in fine black outline with hatched shading in an engraving-like style. The photograph is taken from behind and to the side against a plain pale wall, with the subject's striped top and black strap in the frame.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Branch Leaves Flower Peony Bud Stem Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom Harrigan had been drawing peonies for Mr Pettigrew's seed catalogue since Lady Day, and the block was always the last thing to leave the table at night. Pettigrew wanted the blooms lit as if from a cellar lamp, so every petal was hatched darker underneath, line on line, until the paper looked like the seam at Greyfell where the coal came away in ribbons. Tom did not mind the work. It kept his hands busy while the screens rattled beyond the back wall and the colliers' wives called their children in.

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His sister Nell brought him tea on the third night and stood reading over his shoulder. The bulbous bud at the foot of the sprig was the one the old engraver had drawn closed, a tight fist of petals with no way in. Tom had left a single line open at its crown, a thread of white paper running up into the dark.

"Pettigrew will send it back," Nell said.

"He will. It isn't finished."

"Then why leave the gap?"

Tom thought of the hewers who went down before the fall in February and came up on boards, and of the bud that had sat on the Harrigan windowsill all winter, shut tight, until one morning in April it split without warning. "A peony doesn't show what it is until it opens," he said. "I'm only giving it room."

The proof came back a week later with Pettigrew's note pinned to the margin: too much shadow, cut the dark. Tom did not cut it. When the printed page arrived in its brown envelope he held it to the window, and the light came through the open line in the bud and lay across the table in a pale thread, the only clean thing in the room.