Pink magnolia blossoms and green leaves on a dark branch, in a soft watercolour-style botanical tattoo running down a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Magnolia branch on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a magnolia branch with three open pink blossoms, one closed bud and a larger bloom at the top, all wrapping up the forearm. The petals are softly shaded in pale pinks and the leaves are green, while the stems and a small bud are rendered in grey and dark tones. The branch curves diagonally across the arm against a plain skin background, with part of a checked shirt sleeve visible at the top right.

Botanical Forearm Magnolia Blossom Flower Branch Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had kept the magnolia shut for three weeks, and Brother Tobias had given up pretending he was not watching it from the scriptorium window. The old tree stood against the south wall of the cloister garden, planted by an abbot nobody remembered, and it opened only once the hard weather broke, all at once, as if it had been holding its breath. Tobias had a dish of rose madder, a pot of sepia and a sheet of vellum that had cost the house a good deal, and he meant to paint the branch before the first rain stripped it.

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The Abbot's rule was plain. No branch of the magnolia was to be cut for the refectory or the altar, because the tree was slow and the house was poor and the blossom did not last. Tobias had read the rule many times. He had also read the infirmary book, where Sister Ailith had written in her cramped hand that Brother Piers, the old cellarer, had asked three days running for something pink to look at.

The thaw came in the night. By lantern light Tobias worked the petals in thin washes, letting the paint pool at the edges the way the real flowers did, and when he looked up the window had gone grey and the tree was dripping. He went out in his bare feet, took the small knife from his sleeve and cut one branch, the highest open bloom with a single bud below it, and left the rest of the tree to the weather.

He carried it to the infirmary himself. Brother Piers turned his head on the pillow and looked at the flower for a long time without speaking. Tobias set it in a jug on the sill, and on his way out he saw the closed bud still on the tree, grey at the tip, waiting for another year.