Black and grey botanical tattoo of a kangaroo paw flower with curved stems and shaded buds on the upper arm.

Kangaroo paw flower on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a kangaroo paw flower, with several long, curved stems rising from a single branch that sweeps across the skin. The linework is fine and the stems and buds are softly shaded with grey to give them volume. The tattoo sits centrally on the upper arm against a plain skin background, with a patterned fabric sleeve visible at the left edge of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Stem Branch Bud

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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

The man in lane four had declared a bundle of dried flowers and nothing else, which is how I knew he was lying. Nobody declares dried flowers at Harwich unless they are frightened of them. I unwrapped the newspaper on the steel table and found a single branch, grey and papery, with six long stems bent up like the fingers of a hand reaching for something just out of frame.

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Kangaroo paw, he said. From the Stirling Range, outside Albany, where his mother had grown them along a fence line for forty years. She had died in March, and he wanted a few stems in a garden in Essex, where she had once promised to visit and never had. I had a form for plants and no form for that. So I turned the branch over with my gloved fingers and studied the buds, each one a small soft knuckle clinging to the curve of its stem, and I thought of my own grandmother holding a dried one up to the kitchen window in Fremantle and telling me it looked like a dog's foot, so I would never forget which way the wind had been blowing that day.

The form asked for a phytosanitary certificate. He didn't have one. I wrote a reference number on the slip instead, the kind that sends a thing to the back room for a week of paperwork, and told him the branch would be held for inspection. He nodded like a man who had expected worse, and then he asked, quite politely, whether the stems would stay straight while they waited.

That evening I took the branch home in a carrier bag, which I am not supposed to do, and set it in a jam jar on my windowsill. By morning the tips had turned, every one of them leaning towards the light.