Black and grey botanical tattoo of a slender sprig with three leaves running across the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy sprig on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender branch with three shaded leaves curves diagonally across the outer upper arm. The leaves are rendered in soft, delicate shading with fine linework for the stems and leaf edges. The tattoo is entirely in black and grey ink against a plain pale background, with the arm raised and the rest of the person cropped out of frame.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Leaves Branch Sprig Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sprig had been wrapped in wet flannel since Madeira, and by the forty-first day out of Falmouth the leaves had gone the colour of pencil lead. Mr Oakes, the second mate, said it was dead and I should throw it over the rail with the galley scraps. I told him a thing could look dead and still be waiting for the right weather.

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I had taken the cutting from my aunt's wall at Penryn, a willow that leaned over the lane and dropped its catkins onto the washing. She pressed it into my palm the morning I sailed and said, 'Keep it wet, keep it out of the sun, and don't let anyone tell you it's finished.' I kept it in a biscuit tin lined with moss and changed the water in my cabin every watch, which the captain thought ridiculous until he saw me do it through the squall off the Cape.

On the fifty-third day, while we lay becalmed under a sky like boiled milk, I found one leaf had gone soft and green at the base where the stem had split. I cut the rot away with my penknife, stood the cutting in a jar of fresh seawater, and sat up with it through the dog watch. By midnight there were three leaves, darker along the edges where the lamplight fell, and a pale green stub pushing out of the joint.

We made Port Elizabeth in the second week of March. I carried the jar up the quay myself and would not let anyone else hold it. Oakes walked behind me the whole way with his cap in his hands, as though I were carrying something that might still be alive, which I suppose I was.