Colour tattoo of blue cornflowers with green stems and buds running up the inner forearm, drawn in a fine line botanical style.

Cornflowers on an inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A sprig of several cornflower blooms with thin green stems and unopened buds spreads up the forearm, starting from a bundle of leaves near the wrist. The linework is fine and even, with soft shading inside the petals and purple centres. The blue flowers stand out against the pale skin, and the plain background keeps the focus on the design.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Flower Bud Stem Leaves Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Edith had been at the seed tin since breakfast, sorting paper twists on the kitchen table while the kettle went cold behind her. Her grandson Tom leaned in the doorway with his boots still on and asked when they would walk down to the Long Field.

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"When the buds are fat," she said. "Not before. They open all at once, as if they've agreed to it."

The field had been wheat when she was a girl, and the cornflowers came up through it every June, blue at the edges of the rows like a gas flame turned low. Then the farmers started spraying, and the blue left the hedges one summer at a time. Each autumn she had still gone out with a jam jar and rubbed the dry seed from the cases between her thumb and forefinger, the way her mother had shown her, and kept what she gathered in newspaper.

By the third week of July the buds on the field's last margin had split into little fringed crowns. Tom walked the headland with her, counting. They found eleven clumps, and Edith made him promise to leave the roots where they were. He crouched and held a bloom up to the light, purple at its heart, and asked whether they would come back on their own.

"Only if someone leaves them room," she said, and tipped a dry seed into his palm. He dropped it into the envelope she had labelled in pencil, then sealed it with his tongue the way she had taught him. "Write the year on it," she told him, "so whoever finds it knows where we were."