Close view of a forearm with a botanical tattoo of burgundy and mauve blooms and buds on slender stems, held beside white chrysanthemums.

Burgundy flower sprig on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman's forearm carries a botanical tattoo of three slender stems, with small burgundy and mauve blooms and a bud along each. The petals use soft shading and fine detail in red, purple and brown tones. The arm is held against a blue floral dress, with white chrysanthemums and green leaves in the lower part of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Flower Bud Sprig Stem Bloom Chrysanthemum

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chrysanthemums had come up from Lincolnshire in the back of a van that smelled of diesel and wet cardboard, and Mr Tulley wanted them standing in buckets before the first lorry reached the gate. So I was up at four with my hands in cold water, cutting each stem on the slant the way my mother taught me, because a clean angle is the difference between a bloom that lasts a week and one that drops its head by Tuesday.

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Under the strip light at the back of the stall sat a box of stock I had no business keeping. Three sprigs, cut the week before the frost, the buds still tight as fists. Burgundy mostly, bruised towards purple at the tips, and the lowest flower on the longest stem had gone the colour of old wine on the rim of a glass. My father used to say a flower that colour was the last thing a garden gives you before it stops pretending. I had pressed them between sheets of newsprint under the family Bible in the back room, which is where I keep the things I am not ready to sell.

Ruth from the bakery next door came through at quarter to five, flour to the elbows, asking whether I had anything for the wedding cake. I said no. Then I opened the book and showed her the pressed set, the stems still fine as hair, and she held one up to the window where the first grey light was coming over the bins. Neither of us spoke for a while. Behind her the loaves were already in the ovens, and the smell came through the wall like a question nobody needed to answer.

In the end I wrapped the three of them in tissue and gave them to her for nothing. A thing you press is a thing you have decided to keep, and I had decided, somewhere between the buckets and the newsprint, that someone else should have the keeping for once.