Two inner forearms side by side, each with a small black fine line botanical tattoo of a sprig of leaves, on a forearm placement.

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Matching fine line sprigs on two forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two arms are shown close together, each with a small botanical tattoo in black ink. The tattoo on the left is an upright sprig of leaves, while the one on the right is a branch with leaves arranged in a V shape with a single small dot beneath it. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the plain skin and dark clothing keep the focus on the designs.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Sprig Leaves Branch Twig Botanical Dot

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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

Mae's fingers still smelled of crushed stalks when the Hollins Brothers' fair pulled into the lay-by outside Ludlow, and I was sixteen and holding a watering can someone had filled from a puddle. My job that season was the potted privets lined along the back of the ghost train, which the owner swore brought luck. Nobody could tell me why. Ada, who ran the coconut shy, said they'd been cut from a churchyard hedge the winter her husband died, and that cuttings took best when somebody was sorry over them.

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Sundays we struck the tents and drove on. The cuttings rode in the back of the lorry, wedged between the spare generator and a crate of glass rings, and at every stop I wrote the town in the margin of Ada's ledger beside whichever sprigs we'd lost. Leominster. Hay. A bad patch near Builth where a dog got in and the privets took a month to recover. Ada never let me throw anything out. She said a plant that looked finished was usually just resting its opinion.

The autumn we reached Shrewsbury, Ada pulled two stems from her old pot and set them in one jam jar, crossed at the base like a pair of hands folded in a lap. Beneath them, where a painter leaves a single mark for the seed, she pressed the smallest seed she had into the soil. 'That's the bit that decides,' she said. 'Everything above is just showing off.'

I kept the jar on the lorry dashboard through a whole winter of hard frost. In March the seed split. I planted the green shoot behind the dodgems, in gravel nobody watered, and when we pulled out for the next season it was still there, leaning over the wheel ruts as if it had been waiting to be asked.