Black and grey botanical tattoo of a flowering sprig with leaves and dotted tendrils on the upper arm, against a brick wall.

Botanical sprig on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical sprig of flowers, leaves and a blossom rises up the upper arm, with a larger rounded bloom and leaves on the right side. The design is drawn in fine black linework with some leaf veining and fill, and the lower tendrils are built from small dots. The image is shot in natural light against a red brick wall, with the sleeve of a grey top at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Flower Leaves Sprig Stem Blossom Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had thickened overnight in the jar, so Nell thinned it with rainwater from the butt and began again on the sprig. Mr Asquith wanted the honeysuckle drawn before the frost took the hedges, and he wanted every recurved petal and every vein of the leaves that had grown along the lane behind the mill.

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She had drawn that lane a hundred times since her father's eyes clouded over. The honeysuckle always climbed the same hawthorn at the forest's edge, where the trees stood back from the village like children told not to come closer. Her father had called the dotted tendrils seed-hung, because the plant sent out its runners in beads of green long before it bothered to flower.

On the last morning the hawthorn was bare and a stranger sat on the stile with a leather satchel across his knees. He asked for a clipping and she gave him none. He opened the satchel instead and showed her pressed sprigs, each one the same as hers, each one labelled in a hand she knew better than her own. Her father had been drawing this plant for thirty years, it seemed, and had never once mentioned it to her.

She drew the blossom last, a single open bloom with its heart dotted in stamens, and let the lowest tendrils trail off the page unfinished, so that the drawing would keep one thing still growing.