Close-up of a traditional style holly leaf tattoo in grey shading with a red band at the top, on a forearm, with part of a purple and grey flower tattoo at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Holly leaf tattoo on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a holly leaf with a wavy, spiked outline and grey shading that creates light and dark facets across the leaf. A red section at the top appears to represent berries or a stem, and a partial purple and grey floral design sits at the left edge of the frame. The photograph is cropped tightly on the arm, with the skin and tattoo lines clearly visible.

Traditional Forearm Leaf Berry Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Agnes,

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The holly over the infirmary door has come into berry a full month early, and Brother Cuthbert says it is the frost that did it, though I think the bush has simply grown tired of waiting for us to notice it. I have cut you a sprig from the low branch by the well. Mind the leaves when you unfold the paper. Dunstan, who keeps the garden, says every point on a holly leaf is there to discourage a thief, and the old ones are the cruellest of all.

Brother Anselm sat beside me at vespers and asked whether the berries were poison. I told him only to the foolish, and he looked pleased, which worried me. He has been sharpening his pen-knife on the mill stone every evening since the steward came back from Lincoln with his long face. The abbey is to be sold to the wool merchant, and the chapter has been told the holly is worth more by the cartload than the prayers said beneath it.

So we sat up last night in the cold cloister, eleven of us in our blankets, and each drew one leaf on the back of a psalter page. None of us drew it the same. Anselm drew it with a shadow down one side as deep as a well, and when I asked why, he said the light only gets in where the spines have let it.

I am keeping mine in the chapel box. Come before the spring fair if you can. The gate is still ours until the seal is dry.

Yours in the cold, Margery