Fine line tattoo of a slender wildflower sprig with three small blooms and buds on the inner upper arm.

Fine line wildflower sprig on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin single-line sprig with three small open flowers, a closed bud at the tip and a few tiny leaves, drawn in dark fine linework on pale skin. The stem runs diagonally up across the arm, with the design set against a window blind and a white ribbed top at the edge of the frame. The tattoo is small and mostly black, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Wildflower Sprig Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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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

The bus had gone without us, so Ruth and I sat on the verge outside Hebden with the flask between us and the rain holding off. She had a ring-bound notebook she'd been filling since March, every hedgerow flower drawn in pencil with its name written small underneath in her schoolteacher's hand. I had been picking things for her all morning, and I held out a sprig of something pale with three open flowers and a bud at the top.

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"Not stitchwort," she said, tapping the stem with her pencil. "Stitchwort has four petals cut right down to the middle, and this lot has been pretending all morning. Look at the leaves. They're not opposite, they're wandering." I said they looked the same to me. She laughed and said that was the trouble with loving anything, that after a while you stopped seeing it in pieces and only saw the whole hedge.

She drew it for me instead of pressing it, one unbroken line running up the page at a slant, a flower bent off the stem like someone turning to speak, and the bud left closed at the tip. When I asked why she hadn't coloured it in she said a bud was only a flower that hadn't decided yet, and she wasn't going to make it decide for the sake of a page.

The bus came round the bend an hour late, its windows fogged, and we ran for it with the flask rattling in my bag. I found the notebook on my knee somewhere past Todmorden, open at that single drawn line. The paper was still damp from the rain, and in the margin, in her small careful hand, she had written the name of the plant and then, underneath, a question mark.