Black and grey botanical tattoo of a pine cone with shaded scales, on the forearm of a person wearing a grey velvet sleeve.

Pine cone tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pine cone is shown in side view, with its scales built up from loose, scribbled black hatching and areas of bare skin left as highlights. The shading is soft in places and darker towards the centre, giving the cone a sketched, drawn-from-life look. The cone sits slightly off centre on a pale forearm against a plain light background, with a grey textured sleeve at the top right.

Botanical Realism Forearm Pine cone Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The landlady's rule at Marlow House was that nothing came in off the beach, so you carried the pine cones up from the cliff path in your coat pockets and left them on the windowsill of Room Four until Mrs Pardoe complained. By the second week of October you had six of them, all lopsided, all weeping resin onto the lace runner.

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The drawing was for Teddy, who had been sent down from Bristol with a chest that wouldn't let him climb the headland, and who asked every morning what you'd found. You sat on the edge of his bed with a stub of charcoal and a sheet torn from the back of the ledger and tried to get the scales right. Each one lifted like a hand. You scribbled them in loose strokes, going darker towards the middle where the seeds hid, and left the tips as bare paper so the light could get in.

He said it looked like something you'd turn over under a stone. You said that was the point: a thing that closes up in wet weather and opens in the dry, keeping its seeds shut until a fire or a long hot summer made it let go. He wanted to know whether it worked the other way round, whether warmth could coax one open. You said you'd try it on the radiator.

On the last morning the coach was loud in the lane and the sketch was still on the sill, curled at the edges. Teddy had pinned it to the wallpaper above his pillow, so you left it there. The cone you'd set on the radiator had opened overnight, every scale flared out like a fan, and you left that on the sill for the next lodger to find.