Black and grey botanical tattoo of a radial flower with berry sprigs wrapping around an upper arm, shaded with dotwork.

Radial flower and berry tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical radial arrangement of flower petals and clusters of round berries or buds, centred on a pale gap in the skin. The linework is fine and crisp, with petals shaded in smooth grey gradients and the berries built up with stippled dots. The design fills the arm in a round composition against a plain light background.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Flower Petal Berry Bud Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, pet, and mind the cup, it's hot as the day Ada Pell first came up in the lift with a tin of soil on her hip. Fourteenth floor of Calder House, the one with the cracked light well running down the middle like a dry stream, and nothing green in it since the Coronation. Everybody said so. The council said so in writing.

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But Ada knelt on the landing and pressed in a sprig of elder she'd nicked from the park railings, berries still on it, purple as bruises. She told the lads from the flats below she'd have it flowering by Whitsun. They laughed, and Mr Okonkwo from the fifth floor carried up a bag of ash for the bed. By August the stalks had split the concrete in a ring, and the petals came out in layers, the way a dahlia does when it's showing off, each one shaded grey at the edges as if the rain had got in under them.

Here's the bit you won't believe. The bloom wouldn't grow upward, so it spread. Every berry cluster reached for a window, and every window with a pot on the sill got one of its own, a small round bud that answered back. By winter the whole stairwell was a wheel of dark fruit, and the light well stayed empty, a pale hole right in the middle, because Ada said somebody had to keep the sky coming down to the bins.

Her grandson still counts the berries when he visits. Two hundred and eleven, last time. He always gets a different number, which is how you know it's alive.