Black and grey botanical fine line tattoo of a cotton stem with open bolls and leaves on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cotton stem tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A branching stem of cotton plant with several fluffy bolls and small pointed leaves, drawn in fine black linework with light stippled shading. The design runs vertically down the outer upper arm against a black sleeve and a pale background. The image is black and grey throughout, with soft focus on the surrounding objects.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Plant Stem Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sister Abena went down the ward at two in the morning with a lamp in one hand and a bundle of clean linen under the other arm. Behind the swing doors the night was thick, and the beds ran on into it like rows in a field. Her mother had grown cotton on a red hillside, and her mother's mother before that, and they had always said that cotton remembers anyone who sits up with the sick, and carries their breath out to the field when the bolls split.

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The boy in bed nine had a fever that would not break. The doctors had gone home at eleven and left a chart with his temperature written in ink that had run in the damp. Abena pinned a single dry boll to his pillow, one she had carried in her coat since the harvest, and sat on the hard chair and began to hum the picking song under her breath. Nobody on the ward asked what she was doing. Nobody on the ward ever did.

Near four the fever broke in a sweat that soaked the sheet through. The boy opened his eyes and asked why the room smelt of rain. Abena said she did not know. She lifted the boll from the pillow and found it heavier than before, its seeds rattling like a small bell, and the fibres inside had gone the colour of new milk.

In the morning she walked the hillside in her head, the way she always did at shift change, and saw the plant with one bloom open where there had been none. She wrote the boy's name on the chart in clean capitals and went home to sleep. The boll sat on her windowsill for years after, and it never once went grey.