Colour botanical tattoo on a forearm showing green herb leaves, a rosemary sprig with small flowers and a striped feather.

Herb sprig and feather on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm tattoo of a bundle of herbs, with broad green leaves at the wrist, a rosemary-like sprig with small pale flowers, and a feather rising above them. The linework is fine and dark, with soft layered shading in greens and grey on the leaves. The feather is shaded in warm red, orange and yellow stripes, and the design is set diagonally up the arm against a blurred background.

Botanical Forearm Herb Leaves Sprig Flower Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Leave the bundle on the sill, love, that's the rosemary for Sunday's lamb and I'll not have it bruised by eager hands. Pass me the twine instead, and mind the sage, it's going limp at the stalk. You want to know where the feather came from? Then sit down for it, because it's a long way round.

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Our Tom grew these herbs along the south wall the year the reservoir drowned the lower lane. He kept a sprig of rosemary in his coat every day he walked to the mill, and mint in his cheek when he was cross, and he pressed the little pale flowers into the hymn book so the vicar would smell them come Sunday. When he went north for work he left the beds to me with a note pinned to the gate: keep the parsley away from the mint or they'll fight. I didn't understand him until the spring the mint took the whole border and the parsley went to seed in the gutter.

The feather turned up in June. I'd put it down to the jay that robbed the peas, but there it was, stuck upright in the lavender, barred red and orange and yellow like a sunset over slate. I set it in the jug with the cut herbs and thought no more about it until Tom's girl wrote from Hull asking for a cutting for her new flat. I posted her a clump wrapped in damp newspaper, and folded the feather inside the letter without saying why.

Her reply came back three weeks later. Two lines, and a small brown envelope. Inside was a single pressed rosemary flower and a striped feather of her own, tatty at the edges. Dad's kept the old one on his mantel, she wrote. Now there's two. So there they are, look, back on the sill where they belong.