Two forearms with black linework tattoos in a botanical illustration style, showing a lemon slice, a sprig of leaves and seeds, each labelled fig 1 to fig 5.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fig 1 to fig 5 botanical tattoos on forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, each with a set of tattoos styled as scientific plate illustrations. The subjects include a cluster of berries or peppercorns, a seed, a lemon slice, a sprig of leafy herb and small seeds, each captioned with a handwritten 'fig' number. The work is in black ink with fine outlines and light hatching and shading, and the sheet-like layout spreads across both arms.

Botanical Forearm Leaves Seed Berry Herb Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ottilie Garrow had been promised the plates would reach the printer by Michaelmas, and by the third week of September she had drawn four of the five figures without a single error. The fifth was the trouble. The sprig of wild celery had come up the cliff path wrapped round a crate of tinned peaches, and it had gone limp by the time she laid it on her board in the lighthouse keeper's kitchen.

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The engraver, a man called Pryce who had never set foot on the island, wrote to her every Tuesday. Fig 1 was to be the berries, fig 2 the seed, fig 3 the scatter of small seeds, fig 4 the lemon slice that had come ashore from the same wreck, and fig 5 the herb. He wanted the captions in her own hand, because the printers insisted on it, and because, he wrote, nobody trusted a figure labelled by a machine. She practised her numerals on the backs of spoiled sheets until her fours looked like sevens and then looked like fours again.

On the last morning the wind dropped and she went down to the shingle with a pencil and a folded napkin. The lemon had dried at one edge and gone the colour of old brass. She drew it exactly as it lay, pith and all, hatching the shadow where the rind curled back, and when she reached the caption she stopped with the pencil above the paper, unsure whether the fruit had earned its number or whether it belonged to the sea.

She wrote fig 4 beneath it anyway. Then, in the margin, smaller, she added a line for Pryce: the lemon was not a specimen and had never been collected, so he might leave it off the plate if he liked. The boat was late, as it always was, so she left the sheets face down to dry and walked the shore until the light went out over the water.