Woman in a black V-neck graphic tee showing a green leafy vine tattoo running along her forearm, with small script tattoos on her upper arm and hand.

Green vine tattoo on forearm with black graphic tee

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with blonde hair wears a black short-sleeved V-neck t-shirt printed with a silver sun-like pentagram and the words Saving People Hunting Things and The Family Business. Her left forearm carries a green vine tattoo with outlined leaves and curling stems, drawn in fine line work with simple green fill. Faint grey script sits on her upper arm and a small mark appears on her hand, against a plain white studio background.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Upper arm Hand Vine Leaves Script T-shirt Pentagram

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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

Sit closer, you, where the peat smoke can reach you. The old wall above Scarrow Bay has a vine on it that nobody planted. My grandmother's grandmother said it came up out of the ground the winter the boat from Lerwick never came home, and it has been growing towards the sea ever since, a finger's width a year, curling round every stone it finds. Leaves like little green hands, she used to say, all of them open.

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Now a lad called Tam Ogilvy went up there with a billhook the spring he turned sixteen, because his mother had said the vine was eating the chapel roof and she wanted the slates back for the byre. He cut through the main stem at dawn. By noon the cut end had sent out two new shoots, tendrils reaching for his boots like a dog wanting to be let in. He cut again, and again, and the vine only curled tighter, leaf after leaf unfurling in the wind off the water.

So Tam did what a sensible boy does. He sat down on the wall, stopped swinging, and listened. The vine was talking, low and patient, the way ivy talks in a gale, and what it said was the names of every man the island had lost to the sea. It missed none of them. When it reached the last name it went quiet, and Tam walked home without his billhook and never touched a blade to it again.

They say the stems still spiral round the chapel stones, and if you lay your palm flat against the wall at low tide you can feel it breathing. I have never tried it myself. Some things are better left to keep their own count.