Black and grey botanical tattoo of a five-petal flower and a sprig of clustered blossoms with leaves on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower and blossom sprig on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A five-petal flower with a dotted centre and a sprig of small clustered blossoms sit on a single stem with broad leaves. Fine outlines define the petals and leaves, while stippled dotwork builds the shading and texture of the blossom cluster. The design is in black and grey ink on pale skin, with the sprig angled diagonally across the lower right of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Flower Blossom Leaves Stem Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's kinder than the wind tonight. You want to know how the rose came to climb the lilac, and I'll tell it the way Brother Osric told it to me, with his hands in the soil the whole time, because he never once looked at me while he talked.

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The lilac came over the sea in a clay pot, a gift from a bishop who had quarrelled with his own garden. For forty winters it stood against the infirmary wall and sulked, giving a few grey-purple clusters each May and nothing else. The dog rose, meanwhile, had pushed up through the cracked flags of the cloister uninvited, five pale petals to a flower, and the brothers pulled it out every Lent and every Lent it came back.

Osric, who held the cellarer's keys and had no patience to spare, took a knife to the lilac's stem one April and cut a slit down the bark. He bound a rose shoot into it with waxed flax and said a prayer he never repeated to anyone. The graft took. By midsummer the lilac was holding a rose on one side of its branch like a man carrying a lamb, broad leaves folded over both, and the wasps argued about which blossom was which.

The abbot came out to scold him and stayed to watch. It will never flower properly, he said. Osric wiped his knife on his habit. No, he said, it will flower twice.