Brown botanical tattoo design with flowers and vines running from the back of a hand up the forearm, worn by a person in a grey jumper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral henna-style design on hand and forearm

Botanical · Hand · Colour · Photo

The design covers the back of the hand and runs up the forearm, made of flowers, leaves and curling vines. It is drawn in fine, dense brown linework with small filled areas, and it resembles henna body art. The photograph is taken indoors against a plain light wall, with the subject's face cropped out of frame.

Botanical Hand Forearm Floral Flower Vine Leaves Swirl Henna

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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 fair had packed its rides up in the rain, and you were the last stall still lit, a paraffin lamp hanging from a nail on the tent pole. Tobias came under the flap with his mother's umbrella folded wrong and asked for something that was not a flower. You told him there was no such thing, then took his wrist anyway and squeezed the cone until the paste ran thin and dark across his skin.

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You started at the back of his hand with a rose the size of a shilling, then let the line wander off it into a vine, the vine into a second rose, and the second rose into leaves that curled back on themselves like the ends of a ribbon. Nan taught you that henna keeps its colour only as long as the skin wants it, and that the best patterns look as though they grew there. Tobias watched the lines dry from brown to something close to rust and did not once ask you to hurry.

When you were finished he ran his thumb over the forearm and the vine ran with him, all the way to the elbow, a trail of small leaves ending in a bud he had insisted on. You handed him the lamp so he could see it properly. He said it looked as if it had been there for years. You said it would look like that for a week, then fade, and he nodded as though that was the best news he had heard all summer.

Later, when the field was empty and the lorries had gone grumbling down the lane, you wiped the trestle table and found the cone in the grass with its tip gone flat. Your own fingers were stained to the second knuckle, the same brown as the mud. You stood in the wet with the lamp in one hand and turned your palm over, slowly, checking the lines, half expecting to find a flower there too.