Colour botanical tattoo of a tied bundle of lavender stems with green leaves, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lavender bundle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bundle of lavender stems tied with dark string runs diagonally across the forearm, with three flowering spikes fanning out to the upper right. The purple flowers are shaded softly with lighter and darker tones, while the green stems and leaves use dark outlines and gradual shading. The composition is a single subject on plain skin against a dark background.

Botanical Forearm Lavender Stem Sprig Leaves String Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had tied the bundle three times before Mr Okafor stopped pretending to study the price card and said it would do. The string was black cotton off a reel that had been her mother's, and she drew each knot tight enough to bend the stems. Lavender wants squeezing, her mother used to say, or it sheds its oil on the floorboards and you get nothing for it.

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The stall stood where it always stood, between the fishmonger and a man selling phone cases from a shoebox. By two o'clock the spikes had gone from bright violet to the soft grey-purple of a bruise going off, and the air around the trestle smelled of hot dust and something sharper underneath. Pearl, the old collie, lay in the shade of the tablecloth with her chin on her paws, watching the coins go into the tin.

Mr Okafor came back the following Saturday, which he had never done before. He did not buy anything. He stood with his hands in his coat pockets and said the moths had never got into his wife's good wool, not one hole, and that she had put a sprig of the same bundle in the drawer where her wedding gloves lived. Then he asked if Nell had any left, and she said no, only the empty box and a ball of string.

She cut a length with her teeth, gathered three stems from the stock she had kept back for herself, and began to tie. Halfway through the second knot she realised her hands had remembered the pull without her, the way her mother's had, and she left the loose ends long so the string would trail like a thread from a hem.