Two black fine line botanical tattoos on upper arms, one a bundle of lavender-like stems and the other a sprig of small wildflowers with buds.

Botanical sprigs on upper arms

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The left photograph shows a bundle of three tall lavender-like spikes with slender leaves and small buds tied together at the stem. The right photograph shows a sprig of small open flowers, buds and thin branching stems across the outer upper arm. Both designs use fine black outlines with light shading on a plain, softly lit background.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Lavender Wildflower Flower Bud Leaves Stem Sprig Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle is already shrieking when the boy comes down the companionway, rain still running off his oilskins onto your clean deck. You don't turn round. You are scraping onions into the pan with the flat of the knife, the way Mrs Anstey taught you in Penzance, and you let him stand there dripping until he remembers his manners.

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Above the range hang three bundles of lavender tied with tarred twine, dried since Lisbon. The crew think they keep the moths out of the flour, and they do, but you hung them there for the other reason, the same reason your mother pinned them above the scullery sink, so the smell would fight the damp. When old Pell died of the flux off the Cape Verdes, you took his bunk and his unpaid wages, and you kept the wild flowers he had pressed flat between the pages of the ship's ledger. You have not thrown a single one away.

Tomorrow the purser will count the stores, and he will find the ledger open at the page with the blue cornflower and the yellow buttercup, and he will ask whose hand pressed them. You will tell him the truth, that they came from the cliff path above Mousehole, the last morning you walked it before the articles were signed.

Instead you take the boy's wet sleeve in your fingers and tie three lavender stems to the handle of the ladle with the spare twine. Hang that where the cook can see it, you tell him, and go and get some dry clothes on before you catch your death. He climbs the ladder a little straighter, and you wipe the board again, though it is already clean.