Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hand holding a flowering branch on a forearm, with partial lettering beside it.

Hand holding a blossom branch on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stippled hand holds up a sprig of blossoming flowers with leaves, the stem running down the forearm. The hand is built from fine dots for its shading, while the flowers and leaves use finer linework with light grey shading. The ink is black and grey only, and a short line of lettering sits beside the hand on the upper forearm.

Dotwork Botanical Lettering Forearm Hand Flower Blossom Branch Leaves Stem Lettering

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

No, sit where the lamp can reach you, because this story goes faster when you can see the rocks. Mary Tregenza kept the light at Scarrow Head for thirty-one winters, and in all that time she never once let the gallery door bang. She said a lamp could forgive most things, but it could not forgive a draught.

Keep reading

The spring the almond trees came down in Penhale, the wind off the sea stripped every bloom from the orchard wall and flung the petals out over the water like confetti for a wedding nobody had planned. Dan Ruskin, who brought the post across on Thursdays, found one sprig caught in his oilskin hood when he came ashore. He carried it up the cliff path held low and careful, the way you'd carry a bird with a broken wing, and he asked her if she wanted it.

She took it from him and didn't put it in water. She wedged the stem into a crack in the iron rail, where the salt could get at it, and she said a thing that has come through a gale ought to be allowed to finish what it started. Then she climbed up and lit the lamp, and the beam swept out over the bay where the Penhale boats were still out, and she wrote their names in the log one by one. Beside the last name, in her small square hand, she wrote: all my friends.

Every March after that, when the blossom came back, she cut a single sprig and held it out over the gallery rail for the first boat in. Nobody ever asked her why. The men who came up to fetch the post would reach down and take it, and they'd say it was the nicest thing a keeper ever gave them, which was true, and which she never once mentioned was the only way she had of saying thank you.