Black and grey tattoos on a woman's forearms, upper arm and fingers, including a dotwork mandala, a rose, flowers and a portrait of a woman in a headpiece, with her face hidden behind her hands.

Mandala, floral and portrait sleeve on arms and hands

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman covers her face with both hands, wearing a grey hat and several silver rings, with dark blue hair falling behind her. Her forearms and upper arm carry a dotwork mandala, a large rose, layered flowers, a lotus-style bloom, a portrait of a woman in a headpiece, and fine script lettering. The linework and shading are mostly black and grey, with soft tonal shading and dense dot detail in the mandala areas.

Botanical Dotwork Neo-trad Forearm Upper arm Hand Mandala Rose Flower Portrait Woman Script Moon Eye Lotus Headpiece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The budding knife had gone blunt by the third row of Discovery trees, so Nell stopped at the wall end and spat on the whetstone the way her father had taught her. Late August made the orchard smell of windfalls and wasp-sticky sugar. Down in the lane the rose man's van sat with its back doors open on a crate of bare-root briars wrapped in wet sacking, and somewhere beyond the hedge a radio was playing a cricket score nobody was listening to.

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Harold Pryce had sold her father the idea forty years back: graft a climbing rose into the crown of an old apple and you get two harvests from one root. Nobody in the parish had tried it since. Nell had a Bramley that had lost its top to lightning in the spring, and a bud stick of Albertine she had cut at dawn, its leaves still beaded. She slit the bark in a T, eased the shield under the flap, and bound it with raffia, counting under her breath because counting kept her hands from shaking. On the grey bark beside the cut, a ring of pale lichen had grown in dots so fine and even that it looked stippled on by someone with a very steady hand.

Three weeks later the shield had taken, a thin green thread running under the raffia. Nell unwound the ties and found the bud swollen and tight, a small closed fist pushing against the cold. She wrote the date in the grafting book, then the variety, then, in the margin where her father used to note the weather, the word that had been in her head all month.

In March the rose would open in the apple's crown, and the Bramley would carry both.