Black and grey botanical tattoo in a radial design of petals and berry clusters, wrapped around the elbow of a bare arm.

Radial botanical tattoo around the elbow

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical radial arrangement of flower petals and clusters of round berries radiates outward from a pale central point. The petals are drawn with clean outlines and shaded with fine stippled dots, while the berry clusters are built almost entirely from dots. The image is in black and grey and is framed against a plain white background with a grey sleeve at the top left.

Botanical Dotwork Other Flower Petal Berry Foliage

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

The pen had gone blunt again, so Marjorie Quayle sharpened it on the back of a seed packet and went back to counting. Forty-one berries on the left cluster, forty-three on the right. The ink had to be dotted, not drawn, because her father always said a berry that was outlined looked like a bead on a string. Outside the glasshouse the frost had come early to Hollin Edge, and the rooks were quarrelling over the potting shed roof.

Keep reading

The commission was for the chapel at Ashby Fold, a radial bloom for the east window, petals spreading outward like a clock face with the hours taken away. She had drawn it three times. Each version came out either too tidy or too wild, and each time she laid the sheet on the bench and waited for the pale middle to tell her what it wanted.

On the fourth morning a boy from the farm arrived with a basket of rosehips and elder, cold-handed and silent. He stood in the doorway watching her stipple, dot by dot, until she asked him what he saw. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Just lots of little bits.' She laughed and told him that was the whole secret, that a thing made of little bits could hold more light than a thing drawn in one line.

She finished the centre that night with a single unshaded circle, leaving the paper bare where the petals met. In the morning she carried the sheet up the lane, and when the vicar held it to the window the low sun came through the gap and lay across his hands. 'You've left the middle empty,' he said. 'Yes,' said Marjorie. 'Something has to be let in.'