Colour botanical tattoo of a purple flowering sprig with green stems on a forearm, shown in a collage with black and white animal illustrations at the sides.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple flowering sprig on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The central photograph shows a small tattoo of a single sprig with several clusters of purple flowers on slender green stems, with a few sprigs branching off the main stem. The linework is soft and the petals are filled with shaded purple tones, with lighter highlights giving some dimension. The sprig is centred on the forearm against a dark, blurred background, and the image is set in a collage with two black and white illustrations of an animal's head along the side panels.

Botanical Forearm Sprig Flower Stem Leaves Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Sowerby Bridge would not open his gate until the bargee's daughter brought him something from the high ground, and every spring it was the same thing: a sprig of heather, cut below the flower so the stem could still drink.

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Ada Fenn had carried them down since she was nine years old, wrapped in damp sacking and tucked under the tiller of her father's boat, the Mary Kell. Her father said the moor belonged to nobody and the cut belonged to the water, and that a child who climbed the peat in a March wind was asking to be blown into a bog. Ada climbed it anyway. The wind took her hat every time. She would stand on the crest with her hair full of grit and count the purple heads below her, choosing the ones with the most branches, the ones that looked like they were leaning toward the road.

One spring Tobias Wray was gone from his cottage, the bottom gate had jammed shut with silt, and the Mary Kell sat stranded in the cut with her hold half empty. Ada went up alone. She took three sprigs, branched and heavy, and came down past the sheep with her boots full of water. At the gate she laid them across the sill, stems pointing at the sluice, and waited. Nothing happened for an hour. Then the iron groaned somewhere under the stone and the water began to climb.

By morning the barges were moving again, and the sprigs were still on the sill, the flowers gone grey but the stems as green as the day she cut them. Tobias's wife dried them in a jar above the stove. Every boat that passed the lock that summer slowed down, and every bargee who came through shouted up to the cottage window, asking after the girl with the heather.