Black and grey blackwork tattoos of lungs, flowers and a chain on both forearms, with the palms turned upwards.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lungs and flowers on both forearms

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown from above with the palms turned up. Each arm carries a black ink tattoo of a lung with fine branching detail, a flower with buds above it, and a thin chain or vine near the wrist, built from dense stippled and solid black areas. The tattoos are in black and grey against a dark grey concrete wall and a dark ground.

Blackwork Botanical Dotwork Forearm Flower Poppy Branches Chain Vine Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grafting knife had a bone handle gone yellow from my uncle's thumb, and he kept it in his apron pocket all through August, because the Bramley wood was ready and the sap would not wait for anyone's grief. Dad called the old trees the lungs of the valley, which was the sort of thing he said after two pints, and nobody argued, because the orchard did breathe. At dusk you could hear it, the leaves lifting one after another as cold air came down off the hill.

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Aunt Morag had a gate at the bottom of the lower field that had not opened properly since the winter the wind took the barn roof. She had wound a length of old chain through its bars and hung a rusted link on a nail beside it, and every year the bindweed climbed over both and made them one thing. Poppies grew in the ditch there, papery and red, and the bees went drunk in them until noon. She said the flowers were the only honest part of the place, because they opened and shut and never pretended to stay.

In late August she cut a clean bud from the dead tree by the wall, the one nobody had had the heart to pull out, and set it into the split stock of a young Discovery. She bound it with raffia and said nothing for an hour. I held the lamp. When I asked whether it would take, she only tapped the wood and said the branch would tell us in spring, if we were patient and did not keep pulling at the twine to see.

In October I went down alone. The old tree had gone quiet and grey, but the new shoot had a single green leaf unfolding from the join, small enough to cover with a thumbnail. I cut the raffia, and the branch held its own weight, the way a thing does when it has stopped needing to be held.