Black and grey botanical tattoo of large dahlia-style and poppy-style flowers with scrolling leaves on a forearm, shown in four side-by-side views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral botanical tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the same limb from four angles against a black background, displaying a botanical design of a large dahlia-style bloom, smaller poppy-like flowers and curling foliage. The linework is fine and detailed, with the petals and leaves built up through soft grey shading and dense hatching. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the skin edge to edge, with ornamental scrollwork filling the gaps between the flowers.

Botanical Forearm Dahlia Poppy Flower Leaf Foliage Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dahlia came in from Kew in a tin box packed with wet moss, and by the time Hester unwrapped it the petals had already begun to curl at the edges like burnt paper. Mr Arkwright wanted it drawn before it went to mush. He stood over her table with his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat and said a pattern for a bishop's wife's drawing room could not have a flower that looked as if it had been dropped.

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She drew it in pencil first, then in a grey wash, because the blocks would take only what she could make legible in one colour. The poppies were easier. Poppies only wanted to be left alone to fall apart. It was the scroll that tormented her, the way the stems ran under the bloom and came out the other side in a curl no hand had ever made. She filled every gap she could find with it until the paper looked like frost on a window.

On the third evening a spatter of ink fell across the dahlia's heart, and she nearly wept before she could stop herself. Arkwright came by with the lamp, looked for a long time, then took the brush from her and dragged a spiral of hatching straight through the ruin. 'Nobody will look for the mistake,' he said. 'They'll look for the scroll that swallows it.'

The blocks were cut that month. When the first length came off the press, grey on cream, the bishop's wife stood under the gaslight and ran her glove along the wall, following the stems as though they led somewhere. Hester found a sheet pinned to the drying line the next morning, the dahlia's heart already lost in shadow, and she could no longer tell which of the lines had been hers.