Botanical tattoo of a flowering sprig with green leaves running up the outer forearm, with soft grey shading on the blossoms.

Flowering sprig on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A leafy stem with several open flowers and buds climbs diagonally up the forearm, with the blossoms near the elbow. The leaves are shaded in muted greens with darker tones along their midribs, while the petals and buds are rendered in pale grey with light pink tints. The plain background of a knitted grey sleeve keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Forearm Flower Leaves Sprig Stem Bud Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the island's flowers the way other children learn prayers, by rote and by the turn of the tide. On Skerrow the laurel grows only in the lee of the kirk wall, and by the first week of June its clusters open like small pale saucers, each rim pinched into ten neat points, as though someone had pressed a thumb into wet clay. Your grandmother calls them lambs' cups. You call them nothing at all, because you are fourteen and the mainland boat comes on Thursdays.

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Her herbarium lives in a tea chest under the stairs. Every spring you add a sprig, label it in pencil with the date and the wind direction, and slide it between the pages of a Flora she bought from a ferryman for two shillings. Last June you cut a stem with three open flowers and one bud still shut like a fist, and you laid it flat under the cement block from the byre. When you lifted the block the leaves had curled at their edges, and you said sorry to the stem under your breath, which she would have laughed at.

The boat did not come that Thursday, or the one after. On the third Monday Mr Halloran walked up from the pier with a parcel tied in string. Inside was a letter from your uncle in Glasgow, short and kind, saying the mainland had no room for you yet and that he would write again in the autumn. Tucked under the letter was a single laurel flower, brown at the edges, that he must have carried in his coat since the summer he last stayed on Skerrow.

You carry the Flora to the window and open it at June. Your sprig is still there, its flowers gone the colour of old paper with only the faintest pink left in the creases. You lay his flower beside it, press the page closed with your palm, and write the date under both in pencil.