Black fine line botanical sprigs with small flowers and the word empathy on the inner upper arm.

Fine line botanical sprigs with 'empathy' on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender botanical design of crossing stems, leaves and small five-petalled flowers runs across the inner upper arm, with a few tiny dots beneath. The word empathy is written in a small lowercase script beneath the sprigs. The linework is thin and even in black ink, with no shading, and the design is set against plain, lightly lit skin.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Sprig Stem Leaves Flower Dot Word

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewes had been brought down off the top field before the snow, and Ruth counted them twice through the gate because her father always had. Forty-one, and one lame in the back foot that would need seeing to before the light went. Behind her the yard lamp buzzed on its hook, and the kettle in the farmhouse was already complaining about being left on the hob.

Keep reading

Her sister Bea was waiting at the stile with a tin of shortbread and the look that meant she had been crying in the car and hoped it didn't show. Ruth didn't ask. She put a hand on the back of Bea's neck, cold through the wool, and said the lame one was called Mrs Pickering, which was a joke only the two of them had ever got.

Inside, their mother's pressing books sat on the dresser where they had always sat. Ruth took down the heavy one with the cracked spine and opened it at a page where a sprig of thyme, pale as tissue, had dried flat for thirty years. Under it, in pencil and lowercase, their mother had written a single word. Bea read it over Ruth's shoulder and went very still, the way she used to when they were girls and someone had fallen off the wall.

Outside, the first flakes came down over the yard and settled on the dark fleeces of the ewes, small and even as dots of ink. Neither sister went back to the kettle. They pulled on their boots, took the torch from its nail, and went out to hold Mrs Pickering still while the other one looked at her foot.