Colour tattoo of a purple iris with a closed bud and green leaves on a forearm, shaded in a botanical realism style.

Purple iris and bud on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A purple iris bloom sits at the top of a slender stem, with a closed bud and two long green leaves running down the forearm. The petals are shaded with soft purple gradients, with yellow highlights on the falls and white streaks on the upper petals. The composition runs diagonally up the arm, with the flower as the focal point and the leaves framing the lower half.

Botanical Realism Forearm Iris Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The inspector had already decided the cardboard box held nothing worth opening when the old man pressed its corner flat with his thumb, the way a person settles a sleeping animal. Inside, wrapped in damp newspaper, lay a dozen knotted roots and a single bud sealed in a freezer bag. The form said Aldous Peake, retired, Ledbury. Declared goods: garden plants, personal use.

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Ruth Carew lifted one root to the strip light. It was pale and furred at the edges, and when she thumbed the skin away she found a violet so dark it looked wet. The old man watched her hands the way his wife used to watch the kettle. "Iris," he said. "Her mother's. They came out of a hillside above Varnavas, and she made me promise they'd go in the ground at Ledbury before the frost." Ruth knew the word for the pale root, rhizome, from a childhood spent sulking in her own mother's border, weeding between blades that cut like paper.

She had a stamp, a licence rule and a queue of lorries idling beyond the glass. The rule was clear enough. Plant material from outside the scheme was seized, and the seizure was logged, and the log went to someone who would never see a garden. She picked up the pen, then set it down and wrapped the roots herself, one at a time, in fresh newspaper from the bin.

She wrote on the form in careful capitals: PERSONAL, RETURNED TO OWNER, NO CHARGE. Then she slid the box back across the counter and told him the bud would need light and very little water. The old man tucked the box under his arm, nodded once, and walked out into the grey morning carrying the first of the spring with him.