Black fine line tattoo of a lavender sprig with small stippled buds on the inner upper arm, with a black top and white brick wall behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lavender sprig on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender lavender sprig runs vertically with a row of rounded buds along the top and a thin stem with a single narrow leaf. The linework is fine and crisp, with small dots and light stippling shading the buds. The tattoo is black ink only and sits centrally on a pale arm against a dark top and a white painted brick wall.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Lavender Sprig Stem Leaf Plant

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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

Mind the step, that one's worn hollow by four hundred years of sandals, and sit where the draught can't reach you. Good. Now. Brother Osric had charge of the physic garden at Saint Hilda's, up on the cold shoulder of the moor, and every July he cut lavender for the infirmary and the linen presses, because the moths wouldn't go near it and the sick slept better with a bunch under the pillow.

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The novice who came up the road that summer was called Edwin, though he wanted to be called nothing at all. He had walked from Whitby with a letter he would not show anyone and a face like a shut gate. Osric gave him a knife, a basket and the row nearest the wall, where the bees were loudest, and said nothing about the letter. For a month Edwin cut and tied and hung the bunches to dry, and for a month he said nothing either.

Then one evening in August, Osric found him on the bench by the bee skeps with a single sprig in his fist, turning it over and over. The buds were bruised. Edwin said his mother had grown lavender by the door of a yard in Leeds, and that he had not smelt it since. Osric told him the sprig was his to keep, and that the letter could be read aloud in the chapel if he wished, since those walls had heard worse. Edwin read it that night. Nobody knows what it said.

But in the morning he was gone down the road, and the sprig lay pressed in the psalter on the lectern, where it stayed for three hundred years. I'm told the book is in a glass case in Durham now, and nobody turns to that page, but if you go and look you'll find it there, grey as a moth's wing, still holding its shape.