Black fine line botanical sprig tattoo with leaves and buds on the outer forearm of a person with dark grey hair, face turned away.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical sprig tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A slim sprig with a central stem, small leaves and rounded buds is tattooed down the outer forearm in black ink. The linework is fine and the leaves and buds are shaded with dense stippled dots and light hatching. The photograph is shot against a dark blue-grey brick wall, with the arm raised and the head tilted down so the face is hidden.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Sprig Stem Leaves Bud Plant Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting had gone limp by the time Nell reached the bore at Tarrin Gap, so she pulled the van onto the gravel and sat with the window down, listening to the engine tick as it cooled. The sprig lay on the passenger seat in a jam jar of tap water, its small round buds gone the colour of old pennies. Her grandfather had taken it from a ridge tree the year before the flood, wrapped in a handkerchief, and had never once said what it was called. He only said it would grow anywhere it was looked after.

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The nursery at Quorn had offered to take it, a stranger's voice on the phone promising a fair price and a corner of the glasshouse with its name on a card. Nell had driven nine hours on the strength of that and a photograph of a wall. The road ran flat and pale to the horizon. A crow worked at a strip of blown tyre and did not look up when she passed.

The woman at the nursery was called Ruth, had hands stained green to the knuckle, and did not offer to buy anything. She turned the jar slowly in the light, counted the buds under her breath, then set it down and asked where the handkerchief was. Nell had it in her pocket, folded small, the initials worn almost away. Ruth nodded as if that settled a bill nobody had mentioned.

They walked out behind the fuel shed to a wall of old corrugated iron, and there, rooted in a crack between two sheets, was the same sprig, grown to the height of a child and heavy with buds. "Your grandad," Ruth said. "Every few years someone brings a cutting back to see if it still takes." Nell set the jar down in the red dust and did not pick it up.