Two side-by-side photos of a woman's forearm and wrist with a black and grey botanical tattoo of shaded leaves on a sprig.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy sprig wrapped around a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A diptych shows a woman's forearm and wrist from two angles, with long reddish-brown hair and a knitted cardigan visible. A sprig of leaves with shaded grey and brown tones wraps around the forearm, with the leaves overlapping and curving along the skin. The shading is soft and tonal, with little or no colour ink, and the composition keeps the tattoo centred in each frame.

Botanical Forearm Leaves Sprig Foliage Forearm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Hollin Cross would dance with Maud Tennant that autumn. She had come up from the lowland mills with a sprig of bay tied at her wrist, and everyone knew bay did not grow on the hill. The fiddler said it was a bad omen. The miller's wife said it was a charm to take a man's good sense. Maud only laughed and kept time with her foot on the boards of the Corn Exchange.

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The hall was lit with paraffin lamps that year, and the floor sloped toward the door so the couples drifted that way without meaning to. On the third reel Tom Garside crossed the floor to ask her, and she held out her arm so he could see the leaves winding round it, grey as ash in the lamplight. "Pick one," she said, "and you'll not leave the hill." He reached for a leaf and it came away in his fingers like dry paper, and he stood there holding nothing while the reel went on without him.

Old Hannah at the door had seen this before. She rang the bell at midnight and told them the sprig was a tally: every leaf was a year someone had promised to stay. Maud had given away eleven of them already, and the hall had counted every one.

Maud walked out into the frost before the last reel ended. By morning the lamps were cold and a wet bare footprint led from the boards to the river. Pinned to the door of the Exchange was a single bay leaf, still green, with a note in her round hand: take the twelfth, I am tired of dancing.