Fine line botanical tattoo of trailing stems, small bell-shaped flowers and leaves on a forearm, with a hand holding yellow dried flowers.

Botanical sprig tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand and forearm are raised against a patterned frosted glass background, with a denim sleeve at the wrist. The tattoo is a trailing sprig of small bell-shaped flowers, round leaves and fine stems, drawn in delicate linework with light grey shading. The ink is almost entirely black and grey, and the composition places the tattoo on the lower forearm beside the yellow flower stems.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Sprig Stem Vine Botanical

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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

You are nine the spring the pit wheel stops, and your mother sends you up the bank above Harrowgate Row with a tin and a pair of scissors she never lets you use. The slag heaps have gone the colour of old pennies, but the hedge is full of harebells, bent over as if they are listening for something underground. Your job is to take only the ones with their bells still closed.

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Mr Ashdown from the lamp room says the flowers grow over the old workings because the ground stays warm there, and that is why he will not dig his allotment on that side. You don't believe him. You believe the round leaves more, the ones like coins the rain has missed, which you press between the pages of the chapel hymnal, where nobody reads past the psalms.

The day the men come up the lane with the stretcher, you are still on the bank. Nobody tells you anything. You stand with the tin against your chest until your mother's voice rises through the bracken, flat and careful, and then you know the shape of it from the way she holds her hands. The stems are still in your fist, green and bruised.

Years later you open the hymnal at the back and the sprig is there, flattened to the colour of weak tea, its bells gone papery and grey. You fold it into a letter for Ashdown's grandson, who has gone to Canada, and tell him the flowers came back to the bank the summer after, and nobody has ever been able to say why.