Black and grey botanical leaf tattoos wrap both forearms of a person in a grey dress with hands held open.

Leafy fern sleeves on both forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person in a grey dress with rolled sleeves holds both hands palms up, showing matching leaf tattoos on each forearm. The fern-like leaves are drawn in fine black linework with soft grey shading, and they run from the elbow down towards the wrists. The pale, neutral background keeps the focus on the ink and the skin.

Botanical Forearm Leaves Fern Foliage Leaf Plant

Find an artist for this

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

The inspector turned the tin over twice before he eased off the lid, as if the thing inside might still be wrapped in something he had not been told about. Inside, on a bed of tissue paper gone soft at the folds, lay a single frond pressed flat and dry, its leaflets cut as fine as frost on a window. Ruth Askew had carried it across three frontiers in her coat pocket, and the certificate folded inside the tin was only half the reason she had been kept waiting at the Kell crossing for two hours.

Keep reading

He held the frond up to the strip light and his mouth moved slightly, the way a man's does when he is reading a name he knows. Then he reached under the counter and brought out a ledger bound in green cloth, its corners worn to card. The pages were full of pencil drawings, each fern hatched so densely that it read as shadow rather than line. His grandfather, he said, had drawn every species that grew on the quarry walls above the old border road, and had never once been allowed to take a specimen out of the country.

Ruth told him the plant grew on a north-facing wall above the quarry still, where the spores came down in August and settled in the cracks. She did not say that she had been sent to collect them for a seed bank that needed proof of provenance, or that the ledger on the counter was the only proof anyone had offered her. He turned to a blank page at the back and asked her to write the species name in her own hand. She did, and he copied it beneath in pencil, then stamped the certificate twice and slid it back across the counter with the tin resting on top.