Black and grey botanical tattoo of a tied bouquet of leaves and five-petal flowers on a forearm, shown in a sepia photograph.

Flower bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tied bouquet of leaves, buds and open five-petal flowers runs up the forearm, with stems gathered together by a looped string at the base. The linework is bold and dark, with shading on the leaves and petals and lighter areas left open on the flower heads. The image is sepia toned, and the blurred background shows tattoo flash sheets on a wall.

Botanical Forearm Bouquet Flower Leaf Bud Stem String Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The string was the wrong colour, but Nell had no other. She knotted the last stem against a length of pit cord she'd pulled from the coal office bin, black and greasy and stiff as wire, and told herself nobody at the Saturday stall would look that closely at a posy.

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Her gran had sold posies at the top of Front Street for forty years, bindweed and dog rose and whatever the slag heap would give up in June. The white trumpets opened in the afternoon heat and folded by six, so you had to tie them before they closed or they were worth nothing. Nell had stripped the bank since dawn, cutting sorrel with her gran's bread knife, mud to her knees, humming the hymn the brass band played at the gala.

Across the road, Tom Ridley was waiting by the chapel railings with his cap in his hands. He had come up from the drift that morning with one hand bandaged to the wrist, and everyone knew it was the third time this year he'd been sent home early. Nell had never spoken to him. She held out the bouquet anyway, and he looked at the knotted cord and then at her face, and laughed the way men laugh when they haven't done it for a while.

'For the ward,' she said. 'Gran says flowers help.' He took it with his good hand. Behind her the stall was already folding its cloth, and the first petals had begun to close, one by one, like shutters being pulled down along a row. She would have to make another bunch tomorrow, and the string would be whatever came to hand.