Close view of a hand wearing silver rings and a red wooden watch, with a partly covered traditional-style tattoo of red and green leaves on the inner forearm.

Partly visible tattoo on a wrist with a wooden watch

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's hand rests on a grey surface beside a white cup, wearing silver rings with dark and turquoise stones, a red wooden watch and beaded bracelets. A partly covered tattoo on the inner forearm shows red, green and dark outlined leaf or floral shapes in a bold, traditional-style design. The colour is mixed, and the framing is angled, with the watch and bracelets hiding much of the design.

Traditional Forearm Leaf Floral Watch Ring Bracelet

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, the fire's behind us and it won't keep you warm for long. You want to know about Ada Pryce's gate. Everyone in Hollin Row knows the gate, but not everyone knows why the ivy on it turns red come October.

Keep reading

Ada came up the valley the spring the Ninian shaft flooded, carrying a biscuit tin. Inside, wrapped in damp flannel, was a cutting of something nobody could name, its leaves edged in green and gone the colour of old brick at the tips. Her husband had brought it from a hillside in the south, she said, and he had died before he could plant it. So she set it herself against the pit gate, where the coal dust settled thickest, because she said a thing that grows out of soot has earned its keep.

The men laughed at her. Then the summer the seam caved, and three of them came up with their hands black and their lamps dead, and it was Ada who had the kettle on, Ada who sat them down in the shade of those leaves and said nothing at all. The vine grew over the gate that year, over the hinges and the padlock, and nobody could shut the thing without tearing it. They stopped trying.

Here's the part they tell wrong in the Crown. The vine never once climbed the wall of the manager's house, though he had it cut down twice. It only ever grew where a man had gone down and come back up. You can go and look. The gate's still there, and the leaves still go red at the edges first, the way a thing does when it has stood near the heat for a long time and decided to stay.