Black linework tattoo of an oak leaf with striped vein detail, placed on the inner forearm against a pale textured wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Oak leaf on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large oak leaf runs vertically along the forearm, drawn with a bold black outline and lobed edges. Fine parallel black lines fill each lobe to show the veins, with a solid central midrib and a short stem at the top. The design is rendered only in black ink on pale skin and is centred on the arm against a light, textured stone wall.

Botanical Forearm Leaf Vein Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so you were already at the pier when the wind backed round and the gulls went quiet above the chapel roof. Mrs Abernethy's parcel had come over in the post sack, wrapped in brown paper and tied with tarred twine. Inside, between two sheets of waxed card, lay an oak leaf as long as a school ruler. Its lobes bit deep toward the midrib, and every lobe was filled with fine ink lines drawn so close together you could feel their grain with your thumb.

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There was no oak on Skerrow. The island had one stunted sycamore behind the kirk that the minister swore was blighted, and the nearest oak grew on the mainland at Strathcreggan, a day's sail off in weather like this. Mrs Abernethy had not left the island in forty years. Written on the back of the card was a note: "Take this to whoever keeps the light. The veins run to the stem, the same as the roads run to the sea."

You carried it up the hill to Tam Gillies, who held it to the window and counted the lobes with a pencil, nine on the left and eight on the right. "She's drawn the whole tree," he said, "every branch of it, and she's never once seen one." He pinned it above the stove, and that night the wind dropped for the first time in a week.

Three months later a second parcel came, holding a sycamore leaf with its edges frayed and ragged, and a single line of ink along its midrib: "Now you know what the island is missing." You wrapped it again with care and put it on the morning ferry to Strathcreggan, so that somebody on the mainland could draw it back.