Crossed lavender sprigs on the inner upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two lavender-like sprigs cross at their stems in a V shape, with the flower heads at the top of each. The flower clusters are built from small stippled dots and short marks, while the stems are drawn with thin, even single lines. The design is set in black and grey ink on pale skin and sits centrally on the inner upper arm against a neutral background.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Lavender Sprig Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, closer, and don't interrupt me the way your cousin does, because the wood listens better when a story is told straight. Past the last cottage on Hollin Lane, where the beeches thin out into bracken, there lived a widow called Mabel Tanner who kept two goats, a stone bee-skep, and a row of lavender bushes so old their stems had gone grey and woody.

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Every midsummer she cut the flowering tops with her sheep shears and tied them in pairs with red wool, one bunch for the house and one for the crossroads at the forest edge. Nobody in the village thought it odd. What they didn't know was that Mabel had made a bargain with the hollow ash tree standing there: she would keep the path open for the lost and the late, and the ash would give back whatever the river had taken.

One autumn a boy named Tobias Reeve came up the lane wearing his father's boots on the wrong feet, looking for the track to the mill. He had lost his little brother in the flood. Mabel walked him to the crossroads, pressed a crossed pair of sprigs into his hand, and told him to walk backwards from the ash until the scent went faint. He did as he was told. Three nights later his brother came out of the bracken, muddy and bewildered, smelling of lavender.

So the bargain held, and Mabel never asked the ash for anything else. When folk ask me why the crossed sprigs mark the lane, I tell them two paths meet there, and something has to be left at the join so the right feet know which way to go home.