Black fine line lavender sprig with a dotted triangle outline on the inner forearm, with a hand resting beside it.

Lavender sprig in a dotted triangle on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single sprig of lavender, with several flower stems and narrow leaves, is drawn in black ink on the inside of a forearm. A dotted outline of a triangle sits behind the sprig, and the dotted and solid linework is clean and even. The image is in black and grey, with a dark background and a hand with dark nails and silver rings resting at the lower left.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lavender Sprig Flower Leaves Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dotted lines on Harald's chart were never meant to be walked. Three survey stations, one on the col and one on each shoulder of the peaks either side, joined in faint pencil so the readings could be checked against the ridge. We hauled the theodolite up the pass in October, when the wind off the scree had already turned to knives, and Harald swore at every boulder that refused to sit where the chart said it should.

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The lavender was the surprise. It grew in a scatter between the stones of an old shepherd's wall, grey-green and stubborn, its flower heads gone the colour of dried plums. Harald reckoned a monk had planted it to put in candles. I reckoned nobody plants anything this high and then walks away, so it must have seeded itself out of spite. He did not argue. He cut one stem with his penknife and tucked it into the margin of the chart, right where the triangle would have closed.

We finished the readings in two days. The third station sat true, the sums came out within a hair of the figure in the register, and the triangle that had been faint pencil for forty years lay solid on the paper for the first time. Harald rolled the map and gave me the sprig to carry down, already brittle, the whole pass smelling of it through my coat.

Harald is in the churchyard at the foot of the pass now. Each September I walk up alone with a pocket compass and check the stations, and each September the lavender has crept a little further past the third stone, as though it too had been waiting for someone to close the shape.