Black ink botanical tattoo of a flowering sprig with leaves and small blooms on the upper arm, in a fine line style.

Flowering sprig on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender plant stem rises from a grassy base, with three heart-shaped leaves and two small five-petalled flowers at the top. The linework is thin and even, with some stippled shading on the leaves and stem. The design is in black ink only and sits centrally on the outer upper arm against a soft-focus interior background.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Flower Leaves Stem Sprig Plant Blossom

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off the north sea had teeth that year, and Anna Mhairi walked the cliff path with a basket on her hip and a knife in her apron. Below her the lazy-beds ran down to the shore in ragged green strips, and between them grew the violet sprigs her grandmother called heart-leaf, because the leaves turned their faces to the sun the way a lover does. Nobody on Eilean Dubh picked them for the pot. They were for the dead, and for the sick, and for brides who wanted a little luck tucked in their bodice.

Keep reading

She had come to dig the last root her mother had asked for. The stems were tough and the grass at their feet was wet, and the blossoms, two of them open and one still a bud, nodded at her as if they knew whose child she was. She cut the stalk low, the way she had been taught, and wrapped it in wet sacking. Behind her a boat was coming round the point, and she knew the sail before she could see the man beneath it.

He had gone to the mainland eleven winters back with a promise to return with a ship of his own. The ship never came, but the boat did, and it carried him up the shingle with a bundle of his own and a face gone thin. He did not say sorry. He only held out his palm, where a spray of heart-leaf lay pressed flat and brown between two stones.

She took it, looked at it a long time, and then tucked the living sprig into his coat. "Plant that," she said, "and wait for it to flower." It was the first thing she had said to him in eleven years, and it was the last thing she needed to.