Black and grey gladiolus tattoo with a red inverted triangle and a diagonal line on the inner forearm of a person with the hand resting open.

Gladiolus and red triangle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A gladiolus stem with several blooms and leaves is drawn in black linework with fine shading, running diagonally up the forearm. A solid red inverted triangle sits behind the flower, and a thin black diagonal line cuts across the design from upper left to lower right. The skin and background are greyscale, so the red ink is the only colour and stands out strongly against the rest of the image.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Flower Stem Leaves Triangle Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Harrowgate the castle had lost its roof to a winter storm, and the lord's hall stood open to the sky. Nobody went into the east court after dark, because the old men said a sword had been buried there under the wall, and whoever pulled it would be cut by its own hilt. Mara, the miller's youngest, did not believe a word of it, and she said so loudly at the well.

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One morning in spring she went through the broken gate with a spade and a pot of goat's milk for the guard who would not let her past. The guard was asleep. Beneath the north wall the ground had split, and a green spear of leaves was pushing up through the rubble, and on its stalk hung flowers like a row of small blades, each one opening from the bottom up. She dug carefully around the roots and found an iron tip rusted to lace, with a strip of red cloth tied round where the grip had been, and the rain had not yet rotted it.

She carried the flower home without cutting it, because her grandmother had taught her that anything growing out of a grave should be left whole. The lord's men came the next day with a rope and a surveyor's line. They pegged a straight stroke across the courtyard, from the broken tower to the mill race, and said the king's road would run along it. Mara stood at the peg with the flower in her fist and asked which half of the courtyard they wanted her to stand on.

The road was never built. The men went off to fight in the south, and the lord's hall fell in on itself the following autumn. But every spring a line of gladioli comes up along that surveyor's stroke, red cloth knotted among the stems, and the valley children walk the length of it on their way to the mill, careful not to tread on the flowers.