Fine line black tattoo of a leafy vine curling around the inner forearm towards the wrist, with a small sprig reaching up the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy vine wrapping a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a thin, single-stroke vine with five small oval leaves, curving across the inner forearm towards the wrist. A second sprig rises up the arm on the right edge of the frame. The linework is clean and even in solid black ink, with no shading, set against a blue fabric and a brick wall.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Vine Leaves Branch Plant Sprig

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

Sit nearer, the wind up here steals the good bits from a story. You want the one about Ysolde Pike and the vine, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, on a pass with no name on any map.

Keep reading

Ysolde carried salt and mules over Harrow Gap every autumn. One year the snow came early and she sat out the night in a stone hut with a twist of green cord. Her fingers were too cold for anything but knotting, so she plaited the cord into a ring round her wrist. By morning a single stem had come up out of the frayed end, no thicker than a hair, with five leaves shaped like the tip of a finger. She laughed at it. Then she cursed it. Then she tied it to the lead mule and walked on.

Every crossing after that, the vine crept a little further up her arm and never withered, though it had no soil and no rain, only the salt of her sweat and the wind. The mules learned to lean into it. The carters at the bottom said it was a charm against falls. Ysolde said it was only a plant that refused to be left behind, which is more than most of us can say.

When she came down for the last time, old and slow, the vine had reached her wrist and stopped there, as if it had finally caught up. They laid her under the rowan at the foot of the Gap. The rowan's still there, and if you climb over in autumn you'll see a green stem running along the rock like a bracelet somebody forgot to take off.