Colour botanical tattoo of a leafy branch with blue berries running down the forearm, shaded in greens and blue-greys with black outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy branch running down the forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A slender branch with long, pointed leaves and small blue berries climbs diagonally along the arm. The leaves are outlined in black and shaded with soft washes of green, blue-grey and yellow-green, with some leaves left lighter at the edges. The plain light blue background and jeans keep the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Branch Leaves Berry Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old grafter at Pellow's Farm had one rule for the late summer orchard: never cut the wild branch that came over the wall from the lane. Nobody remembered who had planted it. Its leaves were long and narrow, and in August the berries came in blue as sloes, which was the first thing the children learned to be wary of.

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Tamsin Pellow, who was nine that year and did not trust rules she had not tested, went over the wall on the feast of St Bartholomew with a knife in her sock. She took one slender shoot and ran. The cut bled no sap, only a smell like crushed bay and rain. That night the apples in the top rows went soft overnight, and the bees would not leave the hives in the morning.

Her grandmother did not shout. She walked Tamsin down to the wall at dusk, where the branch had grown back across the stones in one green line, leaf over leaf, reaching down toward the windfalls. "It wants its arm back," the old woman said. She tied the cut shoot to Tamsin's forearm with red wool, and by morning the leaves had spread from wrist to elbow, cool as water and blue at the veins.

Every August after that, Tamsin walked the orchard rows with her sleeve rolled up. The apples fell where they were meant to fall, and nobody cut the wall branch again. The wool rotted off in the first winter. The leaves stayed.