Close photo of a small black fine line tattoo of two crossed sprigs with feathery tips on the upper arm near the elbow.

Fine line crossed sprigs on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of two crossed stems, one ending in a feathery, leafy tip and the other in a sprig with small leaves, sits on the outer upper arm near the elbow. The linework is thin and single-needle style, in black ink with no shading. The soft-focus background shows a black top and a woman's curly, light brown hair, with the tattoo placed off-centre to the right of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Sprig Leaves Arrow Plant

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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

Nell found the cuttings wrapped in a feed sack behind the potting shed, tied at the middle with twine gone grey from the damp. Her father had never labelled anything in his life, so she sat on an upturned crate and tried to guess. One stem ended in a soft, feathery head, like a shaving brush that had been left out in the rain. The other bore small leaves along a bent stalk, a weed she half remembered from the far end of the orchard.

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He had been a bowyer before he was a gardener, though the bows had long since gone up into the attic. He used to say that yarrow was the plant the old soldiers carried, because a man could chew a leaf and pack it into a wound and the blood would think better of running. Nell had taken that for one of his tall tales until the solicitor's letter arrived with a list of everything he had left her, and the list ended with a line about the back hedge that she did not understand.

She crossed the two stems on the bench, the feathery head laid over the other's stalk, and bound them with the same grey twine. Then she carried them down the garden to where the bank met the lane and pushed them into the wet soil, the way he had shown her when she was small enough to need holding up. It would take a year to know whether they would take. She stayed until the light turned orange on the brambles and found she did not mind the waiting.

In April a green shoot came up crooked in the hedge, bending slightly toward the road. Nell left it standing, the way you leave a thing that has decided where it is going.