Black and grey botanical tattoo of pansies and a lavender sprig on the upper arm, shaded with fine stippled dotwork.

Pansies and lavender sprig on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three pansy blooms with overlapping petals and a tall sprig of lavender rising above them, with several leaves at the base. The outlines are dark and clean, and the petals are shaded with stippled dots that fade toward the light centres. The design is in black and grey ink and sits across the arm against a plain pale wall, with a grey textured top at the right edge.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Pansy Lavender Flower Sprig Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The goats would not take the Hollin pass until the lavender was out, so every morning in June Maud Carrick walked up the scree with a stick and counted the purple heads on the slopes. She told the mule-men where the path still held and where the stones had slid in the night, and they paid her in salt and bread, which was more than most people in the valley would give a woman alone.

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Her husband Tobias had gone over the top in the first snow of the year, driving six ewes toward the lower farms, and the weather came down before he reached the cairn. The shepherds searched until the drifts were waist high and then stopped. Maud did not stop. She cut lavender every evening, bound it in strips of his old shirt, and set it in the crevice below the cairn where the wind could not reach it. Nobody asked her why. Nobody needed to.

By the third summer pansies had come up in the cracks around the stones, three blooms to a plant, their faces dark and soft at the centre and paling toward the petal edges as if someone had breathed on them. The old shepherd said they were heartsease, that such a plant grows where someone is waiting. Maud thought it more likely the seed had blown up from the valley, but she did not pull them.

In the fourth spring a boy came up the pass leading a stray ewe on a rope, a ewe with a cracked bell round its neck that Maud knew at once. Tied to the bell was a twist of dry grey lavender and a note in a hand she did not recognise. It said only: the ewe was at the lower farms, and so was he, and he is slower than he was. She laughed until the boy looked worried, then she carried the lavender up to the cairn and tucked it beside the pansies, all of them turned the way he would have come.