Woman seen from behind with black and grey leaf and botanical tattoo sleeves on both upper arms and forearms, with a waterfall and green forest behind her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy tattoo sleeves on a woman by a waterfall

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a bun stands with her back to the camera, wearing a black strappy top and plaid trousers, with a waterfall and dense green foliage behind her. Both arms are covered in tattoo sleeves, with the one on the left showing darker shaded forms and the one on the right showing leaves and stems with fine outlines and shading. The tattoos appear to be black and grey, and the composition centres on the arms against the misty landscape.

Botanical Upper arm Forearm Leaves Plant Sleeve Foliage Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had counted the ferns twice before the rain came off the ridge, and the number had not changed. Forty-one species on the north wall of the gorge, each one pressed into the ledger in her brother's careful hand before he went to the coast and did not come back. She knew the fronds the way other women knew hymns: hart's tongue, maidenhair, the rusty spleenwort that grew only where the spray could reach it.

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The waterfall was loud enough that she had stopped hearing it years ago, and she only noticed it again when the ferns along the path went still under the mist, which was how she knew the water was rising. She took the cutting knife from her belt and went down the slick steps to where a broad-leafed plant she had never named hung over the basin. Its stems were banded like a heron's leg, and in the grey light every leaf looked as though someone patient had gone over it with a fine nib.

She cut one sprig, then a second, and laid them on the wet moss. Her brother had drawn this plant in the margin of the last page, beside a line in pencil: Not in the book. Ask the water. She had always taken it for one of his jokes.

Back at the hut she pressed the stems flat between two pages of the ledger and closed the cover. Outside, the spray hung in the air like a veil nobody had thought to lift. She wrote the date, then beneath it, in her own hand, the name she had decided on for the plant: Tomas's Ink. The rain began again, and for once she did not hurry.