Black and grey botanical tattoo on the upper arm showing a crowned crane with a fan-shaped crest, surrounded by ferns, poppies and wildflowers.

Crowned crane and botanicals on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A crowned crane with a radiating fan of fine lines above its head fills the centre of the design, its face and neck shaded with stippled dots. Ferns, a large poppy, daisies and slender wildflowers frame the bird around the edges of the upper arm. The work is entirely in black and grey ink, with dense hatching and dotwork giving the feathers and petals their texture.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Crane Bird Crown Sunburst Fern Leaves Poppy Daisy Wildflower Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Priya had promised the buffet would be bad enough to make the evening bearable, and it was, so I had time to look for Miss Pell's drawings on the corridor walls before anyone recognised me. Nobody else in the sports hall seemed to remember the crane. It had lived in the bottom greenhouse behind the bins for eleven years, a grey bird with a gold crown that Miss Pell called Admiral, and every Friday she sat on an upturned crate and drew it while we pretended to be doing chemistry.

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Tom Garvey found me by the squash trophies. "You're the one who fed it crusts," he said, and I said I was. Then he told me what I'd never known: the crane got out one June, walked across the field and stood in the middle of the poppy bed with its fan raised until the whole school came out to look.

"She didn't shout," Tom said. "She went and sat on the grass and drew it. Took her an hour. Then she let it be."

His sister had kept the sketchbook, and by the end of the evening we were in the old art room with a torch, flicking through pages of wings and fern fronds. The last drawing had no bird in it at all, only a fan of lines radiating from nothing, and beneath it, in Miss Pell's neat capitals: LET IT GO WHEN THE FERNS UNFURL. We stood there a long time with the torch on the blank paper, and outside, under the car park lights, the ferns along the fence were just starting to uncurl.