Botanical tattoo of a green evergreen sprig with dark berries on a person's forearm, shown against a pale grey wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Evergreen sprig with dark berries on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A slim sprig of needle-like green foliage curves diagonally up the forearm, with clusters of dark blue-black berries along its stem. The leaves are shaded in layered greens and the berries are rendered with soft dark shading and small highlights. The tattoo sits centred on the forearm against a plain pale background, with a dark knit top and black trousers at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Sprig Berry Foliage Leaves Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hand me that lantern, and mind the drip, because I'll not tell this twice. You want to know why Mags Tully kept a sprig of juniper tucked in her coat through the whole of the Greenland run? Her brother had gone down the winter before with his gums rotting out of his head, and she swore on his grave that no crew of hers would go the same way.

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The surgeon aboard the Margaret Ann had his cures, lemon and sauerkraut and a brown bottle he wouldn't name, but Mags knew the older ways from the Shetland women who'd taught her to pick. Every morning before the watch changed, she sent the cabin boy up the rigging with a sack and a knife. Blue-black berries, crushed between the teeth, bitter as a curse. Half the hands cursed her for it. Still, they chewed.

Then came the storm off Cape Farewell that took the mainsail and near enough the bowsprit with it. Three days of it. On the third, the water casks were fouled and the bread had gone green, and the men sat in the gangway with their jaws swollen, watching her the way men watch a woman they've decided is a witch. Mags went below and came back up with a pot of broth thick with needles and berries, and she drank the first cup herself, in front of them all.

Nobody died that voyage. The men still say the juniper saved them, and I still say it was the lemons, but I'll not argue with a sea that gave us back our teeth. So when you see that sprig on some fool's arm in the port tavern, you tell him Mags Tully paid for it with her brother's name. Now get that lantern out of my eyes.