Black and grey blackwork tattoo of an open flower with dotwork centre and solid black petals, enclosed in a thin diamond outline on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower in a diamond frame on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large open flower with detailed engraved-style linework fills the centre, with a stippled dotwork centre and solid black silhouette petals behind it. A thin black diamond outline frames the flower, and the petals extend past its edges. The tattoo is rendered in black ink and grey tones on pale skin.

Botanical Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

There was once a bargeman on the Oxford Canal called Joseph Pell, who carried coal north and came back south with nothing in his hold but debt. He had a daughter, Ruth, who was given a black tin box by a lock keeper's widow at Hillmorton. Inside was a drawing of an open flower, its petals cut from ink, and a square of card with a diamond ruled round it. The widow said the flower would only grow where the frame could not hold it.

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Ruth laughed and pinned the card above the stove. That winter the coal money failed and her father sold the horse. By spring the card had curled, and a dark shape had spread past the diamond's lines, soft black petals lying over the corners of the cabin. Her father said it was damp. Ruth said nothing. She only watched the thin lines grow edges they had never had.

In May the bottom gate at Napton stuck, and Joseph went down into the chamber to free it. The water came up faster than he expected. Ruth stood on the towpath with the mooring rope in her hands and heard the frame knock against the cabin wall. When she turned, the card had split along the diamond, and a pale flower the size of a cartwheel was pushing through, its centre dotted like frost on a window.

She made the rope fast to the bollard and waited. Her father came up the ladder streaming and laughing, and he never once asked where the flower had come from. They say the barge still moors at Napton, and that on wet mornings the towpath is covered in black petals, though nobody has ever found the card.