Woman in a black crop top holding a blue mug, with a dark black and grey botanical tattoo on her right forearm and fine script on her left wrist.

Dark leafy tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photo of a woman in a black crop top and grey sweatpants, holding a blue mug in one hand. A dark botanical tattoo with leaf-like shapes covers part of her right forearm, and small fine lines or script sit on her left wrist near several thin bracelets. The kitchen setting is softly lit, with the composition focused on the arms and midriff.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Leaves Script Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ivy came over the harbour wall the spring the Halvard boat failed to return, and by the time anyone in Skerrow Quay thought to cut it back, it had reached the chandler's window and was pressing its dark leaves against the glass like a crowd outside a shut door. The leaves were nearly black when wet, shaped like small spearheads, with veins that caught the light the way tar does on a jetty.

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Mara Venn kept the bakery at the top of the steps and had no patience for gossip. She took her shears down to the wall one morning at low water, but the stems bled a sap that smelled of cold tea, and the blades slid off them as if they were wet rope. Behind her, the children said the ivy hummed when the tide turned. Mara told them to stop being soft and went back to her proving dough, though she left the shutters open that night.

In the grey hour before the fleet went out, she found the Halvard boat's painter knotted into the roots at the base of the wall, still green from the sea, and under it a ring of black leaves wrapped around a tarred glove. She did not cut anything. She carried the glove home in a flour sack and laid it on her step, and the ivy followed her up the lane a little further each morning until it reached her door and stopped there, quiet as a dog that has been fed.

She never learned what it wanted, but she learned the bargain. Every boat that went out came back, and every cord that came back had a single dark leaf tied into its knot. Mara still bakes at the top of the steps. When the wind is from the west, she goes down to the wall with a bucket of warm water and washes the leaves clean, and they shine like wet slate in her hands.