Botanical neo-traditional tattoo of cream hellebore flowers, holly, dark berries and pine sprigs in a bouquet on an upper arm.

Hellebore and holly bouquet on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A bouquet of three cream hellebore flowers with yellow centres sits alongside holly leaves, dark blue-grey berries, a spray of yellow blossom, pine sprigs and a pine cone. The linework is bold and outlined, with soft shading on the leaves and petals that gives them volume. The palette is muted, mostly greens, yellows and grey, with small touches of warm brown on the stems, and the design is arranged as a diagonal bouquet across the skin.

Botanical Neo-trad Upper arm Flower Berry Pine cone Leaves Bouquet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, lad, it's the only warm thing aboard and it's not generous. I'll tell it before the lamp goes. You'll not find a hellebore on a whaler, nobody thinks to bring them, but Mrs Haddow in Peterhead kept a pot on her sill, and the week the Margaret sailed she pressed three of the blooms flat between sheets of brown paper and pushed them into my coat. "For when you forget what a garden looks like," she said, and I thought it was daft then.

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By the second Christmas we were held fast in the pack, the Davis Strait gone white to the horizon and our bread down to the weevils. Cook Ewan Strachan went out on the ice with the mate's knife and came back with a fistful of pine from the lee of a berg, dark and stiff, and a cone he'd prised from a split of driftwood. Nobody knew where a cone came from up there. He said the trees were further south than they had any right to be, and nobody argued, because nobody argued with the cook that month.

On Christmas Eve I opened the paper. The flowers had gone the colour of old tallow, but the petals still held, cream at the edges and a little gold at the heart. Ewan found a sprig of holly in the bottom of the spirit crate, its berries gone grey, and we bound it all together with a bootlace and set it on the galley sill, the ice pressing against the glass. Dawn came up and the pack split like a loaf. I still have the paper. The cone sits on the mantel where you're sitting now, so mind it.