Close-up of a small fine line black tattoo of a flower stem with two buds and leaves on the inner forearm, near a red string bracelet.

Fine line flower stem on an inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black line forms a stem that curves up the inner forearm, with a small open flower at the top, a closed bud lower down and several leaves along the stem. The linework is delicate and mostly solid black, with light grey shading in the petals and bud. The tattoo sits against plain skin, with a white top, dark jeans and a dark blue wall behind the subject.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting has lived in a jam jar on the galley shelf since Gravesend, wedged between the pepper tin and a bottle of Madeira nobody is supposed to touch. You told the second mate it was for the captain's sickbed, which was a lie, and you have told it again each Sunday since, which has made it harder to stop.

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It was your mother's rose, or the bush she grew against the wash-house wall in Deptford, and she pressed a stem wrapped in wet newspaper into your hand the morning you signed on. Nothing about it should have lasted six weeks. Salt gets into everything. Still you change the water with a tin cup each morning, and you watch the bud lower down the stem, closed tight as a fist, while the open flower above it goes papery and pale at the edges, then steadies.

Off the Cape the cook asks what you're waiting for. You tell him the bud. He laughs and says buds are only buds until they aren't, and there is no sense in a grown man keeping a thing alive out of spite for the weather. You do not argue. You wake at four with the ship groaning under you and the galley smelling of cold coffee, and you find a leaf has come out at the joint of the stem, new and green, pushing through the way a wrist comes out of a cuff.

Shanghai comes up grey on the eleventh of October. You go ashore with the jar in your coat pocket and water slopping against your ribs, and at the customs shed the inspector frowns at it and asks what it is worth. You hold it up to the light instead. The bud has split at its seam, one petal the colour of weak tea showing, and you think of the wash-house wall and your mother's cold hands showing you how to strip the leaves. You let him look.

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