Small black fine line tattoo of a slender sprig with tiny buds on the inner upper arm, below a rolled white shirt sleeve.

Fine line sprig on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, delicate sprig with a thin central stem, branching twigs and tiny bud-like tips is drawn in black ink on the upper arm. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the design is shown in a single dark ink against pale skin. The photograph is taken in daylight, with a white shirt and rolled sleeve filling the right side of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Sprig Stem Bud Twig Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tip behind Hollin Pit was the only green thing for two miles, if you didn't count the chapel hedge, and nobody went up there unless they had to. I went because Mam had asked for something alive in the house. Dad was on the back shift that week, and the kitchen had gone grey with his dust no matter how hard she scrubbed the table.

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The plant grew in the cinders where nothing else would. Its stems were thin as bootlaces and wandered up out of the clinker, branching into little clusters that ended in buds the colour of wet slate. I snapped one off at the base, the way Grandad taught me to take cuttings from the allotment, and carried it down the path inside my cardigan so the wind couldn't get at it.

Mam put it in a jam jar on the windowsill above the sink. She said nothing about it, but she moved the jar every morning so it caught the light, and by Friday two buds had opened into flowers no bigger than a fingernail. When Dad came up the back steps at six, black to the eyebrows, he stopped in the doorway and looked at the jar for a long time before he went to wash.

The stem went brown in the end, the way they do. Mam pressed it flat between the pages of the hymn book and left it there, and I still find it sometimes when I go looking for a tune, a thin dry line holding its place between the verses.