Black and grey botanical tattoo of daffodils and butterflies running up the inside of a forearm, with soft shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Daffodils and butterflies on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of daffodils with long leaves climbs the forearm, with three butterflies placed among the blooms, one near the top and two lower down. The linework is clean and the petals and wings are finely shaded in grey and black, giving them depth. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a plain pale wall, with the wearer's dark top and pink shorts at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Daffodil Flower Butterfly Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The daffodils came up along the cliff path the spring after my father's knees gave out, and by March they had taken the whole bank below the lamp room. Nobody planted them. Mrs Quayle at the cottage swore a sailor had brought the bulbs in his kitbag from Scilly and tipped them out on the rocks for luck, and I have never caught her in a lie about anything else.

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I was twelve and bored of the rota. Each evening I climbed down with the oil can to top up the reserve lamp and came back up with my hands black and my pockets full of stems I wasn't supposed to pick. Butterflies came in off the sea that year, pale and ragged from the crossing, and they settled on the blooms as if the flowers had been put out for them. My father called them the lamp's moths. He said the light drew them in and the flowers kept them.

In May the wind backed round to the east and a fishing boat did not come in. We watched from the gallery with the glass. My father said little while we waited, only kept the wick trimmed and counted the flashes out loud, as though counting kept the boat afloat. When it finally rounded the point, its hull scraped and its skipper shouting, I cut the first daffodil I had ever been allowed to cut and laid it on the rail for him to see.

The skipper took it, looked at it a long time, and tucked it in his oilskin. Years later he sent a postcard from Newlyn with a print of the coast on it and one line on the back: the flowers are still there, keeper's girl. I pinned it above the lamp table. Every spring I go down to check the bank, and every spring the butterflies come in off the water to find them.