Neo-trad style colour tattoo of a green man face framed by leaves and hops, sitting on the forearm with roots below.

Green man with hops on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green man face sits at the centre of the design, formed from oak-like leaves and hop cones, with a leafy beard and roots spreading across the lower section. The bold black outlines and smooth green and ochre shading give the tattoo a classic, illustrative look. The image is a close, slightly angled view of the forearm against a blurred indoor background, with the colours clearly visible.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Face Leaves Root Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Plough's lane by four o'clock, and by six Mrs Abernethy had given up pretending the back door would open. We were eleven in the taproom, counting the carrier who'd sworn he'd only come in for a half and stayed three days. Outside, the hop garden lay under a white sheet, the bines cut to stumps and the poles standing in rows like a choir nobody had called.

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It was the carrier who asked about the face. He'd been staring at the beam above the settle, where old Tom had nailed a green man some years back, a wooden head with oak leaves for hair and a beard of hop cones. 'Who's that, then?' he said. Mrs Abernethy said it was the one who came up out of the ground when the barley was cut, that his roots ran under every field in the parish, and that you never swept the hearth on a Sunday in case you swept him away.

I told the carrier what my grandfather told me: the man in the leaves was owed a pint each harvest, poured on the roots and not drunk. So at midnight, when the others had gone up and the fire had sunk to red, I took the last jug out through the snow to the hop yard. The poles stood black against the sky. I knelt and poured, and the ground under the snow drank it with a sound like breath being let go.

When I came back in, my boots were tracked with mud that should not have been there, and the carrier was awake by the settle, grinning up at the beam. 'He's got a face now,' he said. I looked. The carved leaves had turned a little greener in the lamplight, and one hop cone had split open, damp and fresh, as if it had been picked that morning.