Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Leaves and berries on a forearm
Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo
The tattoo shows a sprig of broad green leaves with a cluster of round berries, shaded in blue-grey and dark tones with fine outlines. It runs diagonally up the outer forearm, with the leaves at the top and the berries at the lower end. The colour is muted olive and blue-grey against the skin, and the arm is framed against a dark patterned skirt.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The bushes have dropped everything by the second week of February, and you walk the rows at Hollin Brook with the secateurs in your coat pocket and frost still white in the ruts. Your uncle Ned always said the blueberry canes sulk if you prune them before the sap is down, so you wait, counting the dead stems against the fence posts. The ground is hard enough to ring under your boots.
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Halfway down the third row you find a stem that never lost its leaves. The leaves are broad and olive, bent over at the tip as if listening, and beneath them hangs a knot of berries the blackbirds have missed, gone dusky blue and dusted with frost. You kneel in the mud and pull off your glove. Ned would have called it a freak of the weather. You call it a bargain, cut one sprig, and wrap it in the tissue paper from the seed packets.
Back in the packing shed the kettle is coming to the boil and the radio murmurs the shipping forecast like a rosary. You lay the sprig on the bench beside the ledger, where the picking dates are written in Ned's square capitals. Beneath his last entry, 14 AUGUST, FOUR CRATES, you write the date in your own hand.
Then, after a long while, you add one more line: one sprig, kept.
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