Black and grey dotwork and linework tattoo of tall flower spikes and leaves inside a circle on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical spikes and leaves in a dotwork circle

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of tall flowering spikes and broad leaves sits inside a circular frame on the forearm. Fine linework defines the leaves and stems, while stippled dots shade the background sky and the outer edge of the circle. The design is entirely black and grey and is centred in the frame against plain skin.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Leaves Plant Stem Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Hatton had told us the mullein would never flower on a boat, that it wanted clay and a hard winter, and my father said that was exactly why he'd bought three pots of it at the garden centre in Stourport and lashed them to the roof rail with baling twine.

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Every morning he counted the spikes like a man counting change. The flowers open from the bottom up, he told me, a ring at a time, so the top stays shut until the bottom has had its turn. We'd pass under bridges with the leaves brushing the brickwork, and he'd lean on the tiller and say, look at that, Aaron's rod, that's what the old herbalists called it. I thought he made the names up until I found it in his seed catalogue, underlined twice in biro.

The summer the canal flooded above Tardebigge, we were stuck three weeks behind the weir with the water too high to move. The pots went green, then gold at the leaf edges, and Dad stopped counting. One dawn I came up on deck and the highest spike had opened all the way, pale and dusted with pollen, and he was sitting with his back against the cabin and a cup going cold in both hands, not looking at it.

We sold the boat in October. I kept one pot. It lives on my windowsill in a flat with no water view, and every June I turn it a quarter so the top gets the sun, which is the one thing about it he never got around to telling me.