Two black line tattoos of flowering stems on the inner forearms, one a tall gladiolus-style stem and the other a wildflower sprig, in a fine line botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching flower sprigs on two forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching botanical tattoos sit on the inner forearms of a person in a dark jumper, with the torso and arms cropped so no face is shown. The left arm carries a tall stem with trumpet-shaped blooms and long narrow leaves, while the right arm has a slender sprig with clusters of small five-petalled flowers and leaves. Both designs use clean black outlines with no shading or colour, set against plain pale skin on a light background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair packs up on a wet Sunday in Margate, and you are the last one still scraping candyfloss sugar off the generator lid when Bea Hollis comes across the grass with a bundle of gladioli wrapped in yesterday's paper. Her father's stall, the one with the rifle range and the cracked lamp, has sold out of everything except these.

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"They're for the lorry," she says, "if you'll show me how to win a coconut." You have been throwing at that shy since you were nine, and you know the trick is in the wrist, not the shoulder. She misses four times, then a fifth throw knocks the top clean off the post, and she shrieks like the dodgems have got her. You hand her a stem from the paper, its blooms still closed at the top like fists.

Next morning the convoy pulls out before dawn, and you watch from the cab window as the lorry carrying Bea's family's stall takes the Ramsgate road the other way. Weeks later you find a sprig of wild forget-me-nots pressed flat inside the programme for the Bank Holiday fair, tucked under the cash tin. There is no note. Just the small blue-white flowers, five petals each, pinned to the card with a hair grip.

Somewhere in the spring the gladioli come up in your mum's garden, tall and crooked, and you cut the first spike for the kitchen table. You think of her wrist, the way she learned the throw. The flowers open from the bottom up, the way they always do, and you stand there with the scissors until the last bloom has reached the top and the whole stem finally stands straight.

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