Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bouquet of marigold-style flowers and leaves tied with a ribbon, running along the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower bouquet tied with ribbon on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bouquet of two large, layered flowers with buds and leaves is tied at the base with a looping ribbon. The design uses fine black outlines with stippled and dotted shading to build up the petals and foliage. It is in black and grey ink and wraps up the outer forearm, with the bouquet stems at the wrist and the blooms rising towards the elbow.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Flower Bouquet Leaves Bud Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Halfway between the Cape and the Leeward Islands the men of the Marigold stopped talking about home, and the mate knew they were close to breaking. He went down to the purser's locker, where the effects of the drowned were kept until a port could be reached, and came back with a bundle of stems tied in grey ribbon. Nobody had claimed it. It had come aboard at Bristol in a sack of seed, and the knot had been pulled so hard that no one liked to touch it.

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His grandmother had told him that a bunch of flowers tied by a hand that wanted you home would keep the wind kind for as long as the ribbon held. The mate was not a superstitious man, but he was a tired one. He picked the knot loose with a marlinspike, shook the dry heads over a tin of wet earth on the foredeck, and pressed the seed in with his thumb. The cook laughed at him. The boy who swept the galley did not laugh, and he kept the tin watered from his own cup for nine days.

On the tenth morning there were two green shoots no longer than a finger. By the end of the week the marigolds had opened, orange and dense as coins, in the spray off the bow, and the sails that had hung slack for a month filled in a single hour. The men took turns with the watering can after that, and nobody spoke of the ribbon except to say it had earned its keep.

The mate kept it. He tied it round the taffrail, where it lifted and fell in the wind all the way into port, and when people asked him what it was for he said it was holding the weather to its word.