Black and grey botanical tattoo of a flower with leaves on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower and leaves on the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded flower with layered petals and a central bloom sits on the back of the hand, with two large leaves extending down towards the knuckles. The work uses dark outlines with grey shading and fine internal detail on the petals and leaf veins. The image is in colour only as skin tone, with the tattoo in black and grey ink against a plain pavement background.

Botanical Hand Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hettie Marsh had tended the planters on Platform Two for nineteen years, and in all that time nobody had asked her the name of the dark-leaved bloom that came up every August beside the signal box. She knew it was not a dahlia. The seed packet was still tucked behind the clock in the waiting room, its printing long faded, the name crossed out in a hand that had given up on it.

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On the Tuesday the 14.12 to Leeds was cancelled for a points failure, and a young man came off the stopping train with a rucksack and a battered sketchbook. He asked whether the station still had the old rose bed. Hettie said it did, though the roses had given up years ago, and he sat on the bench while she weeded, drawing in pencil. He shaded each petal darker towards the centre until the flower looked like it was keeping a secret.

He asked why she never cut the leaves back in September. She told him the leaves were the part that lasted, and the bloom only went over. He turned the sketchbook round so she could see. He had drawn her planters with every leaf veined like a map of a river, and in the corner was a bloom far bigger than any real one, its petals folded around a small, bright centre.

She tore the page out for him, then thought better of it and kept it. That winter she pressed it flat inside the timetable where she could find it. Each spring, when the dark bloom came up against the signal box, she cut one leaf and laid it between the pages, and the 14.12 came in on time.