Black and grey botanical tattoo of a flowering branch with a cluster of blossoms and leaves running up the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flowering branch tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A flowering branch with a dense cluster of small blossoms at the top and several broad leaves along the stem runs up the forearm. The design uses black linework with dotted and stippled shading in the blossoms and leaves, with no colour ink. The arm is held away from the body against a plain wall, with a person in a striped top and dark jeans visible at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Flower Blossom Branch Leaves Stem Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the cutting survived the Bay of Biscay wrapped in a wet flannel and tucked inside an empty biscuit tin, and I have been forbidden by the mate from keeping it anywhere but the galley. It sits on the shelf above the range, where the warmth is kind to it and the ship's cat can't get at it, though he tries every watch.

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You'll remember the old man in Gdansk who gave it to me, the one with the blue cardigan and the bad knee who said a branch wants to be carried more than it wants to be planted. The leaves are broad and ribbed, and the blossoms have come on the stem in a cluster so dense it looks as if someone spilt sugar on the cloth. I've taken to counting the dots on the flowers while I peel potatoes. Four hundred and twelve yesterday. The boys from the forecastle say I've gone soft in the head, and perhaps I have.

At Valparaíso the purser wanted it over the side. He said lilac brings the dead aboard, which is nonsense, and I told him so in front of the whole mess. I didn't tell him that I had already dug it a bed in a bucket of harbour mud and sworn to the second mate that I'd eat my own apron before I let it go. We have rounded the Horn since then, through three days of hail that stripped the rigging, and the bucket never once tipped.

This morning there was a single open flower on the top shoot, pale as a sixpence and smelling of something I haven't smelled since our mother's back step. I cut it, pressed it in the Bible under Ruth, and I'm writing this with it beside me. Tell Mother it has flowered. Tell her the cook says so.