Small black fine-line tattoo of a botanical sprig with branching foliage on the inner forearm, beside a rolled grey linen sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line sprig on inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender sprig of branching foliage is drawn in fine black linework, with a few small dots along the stems. The motif sits on the inner forearm of a person whose grey linen sleeve is rolled above the design, against a plain pale wall. The piece uses only black ink with light tonal variation, and the composition is centred and compact.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Sprig Foliage Branch Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Rennie sends you up the spoil heap before the shift horn, because the wind comes off the colliery from the east and carries seed with it. Your boots slide on the grey slag and the lamp knocks against your hip on its hook. Nothing grows on that heap. Everyone at the Institute says so, and that is why the one green thing on the north face is spoken of the way people speak of a neighbour's debts.

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It is a birch, or it means to be. Two stems, thin as knitting needles, fork into the dust as if someone had drawn them with a pen running short of ink. Along the twigs sit small dark beads where the buds should be. Mrs Rennie says you must not pull it. You must count the beads each morning and tell her the number, because her Arthur counted beads on this same slope the week before the roof came in, and the number he gave her was wrong, and she has never forgiven the number.

On Thursday there are eleven. On Friday there are twelve. On Saturday the wind swings west and the sky over the winding gear turns the colour of lamp glass, and you stand with the sprig between warm fingers, hoping one bead will drop into your palm like a coin from a torn purse.

At the bottom of the heap the horn sounds. You carry a single stem down in your breast pocket, and at Mrs Rennie's window you set it in a jam jar of cold water, beads still clinging to it. She asks for the count. You tell her thirteen, which is the only lie you have ever told her, and she believes you the way you believe in the birch.