Black and grey botanical tattoo of a lavender sprig with a tied stem on the inner forearm of a person in dark top and jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lavender sprig on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lavender sprig with several flower spikes and narrow leaves runs up the forearm, with its stems bound together at the base. The linework is dark and fairly fine, with light grey shading across the leaves and stems. The plant fills the forearm diagonally against a plain black top and blue jeans, with an indoor staircase behind.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Lavender Sprig Flower Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor on the ninth floor had the only balcony in Hollis House that anybody bothered to look at, because she kept lavender in terracotta pots along the rail, and in July the whole block smelled of it. I took the stairs that week because the lift was out again, and I was still counting landings when she caught me on fourteen, holding a bundle of cut stems tied with garden twine.

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"Too many for one jar," she said, and pushed them into my hands before I could argue. "Hang them upside down somewhere dark. Don't let the damp get at them."

I hung them from the broom hook in my hall cupboard, heads down, the way she'd shown me. The flowers dried to the colour of pencil lead, and the scent filled the cupboard until I stopped noticing it, which is how I knew I was getting used to things. She had nursed at the Royal for thirty years, she told me once, and her husband had planted the first pot the summer they moved in, because he said a flat should have something alive on its side.

In October the lift was mended and I stopped using the stairs. A letter addressed to her flat was delivered to my mat by mistake, so I carried it up on the Tuesday. Her door stood open. A woman I didn't know was carrying a cardboard box past me, and the hallway smelled faintly of dried flowers.

I took the bundle down that evening, still tied in its twine, and hung it back on the broom hook. The cupboard smelled of July for weeks afterwards.