Colour tattoo of a raspberry sprig with green leaves on the inside of a forearm, shown against a dark background.

Raspberry sprig on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A branch of raspberries with green leaves and a small unripe bud runs diagonally up the inner forearm. The berries are shaded in red with lighter highlights, and the leaves use layered greens with dark outlines. The arm is photographed against a dark, blurred background with a grey sleeve at the top of the frame.

Botanical Forearm Berry Leaves Branch Fruit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The canes have to come down before the sap rises, so you go out in January with the secateurs in your coat pocket and your breath hanging in front of you. Dad always said raspberries forgive almost anything except neglect. Along the south wall of the orchard they have grown into a tangle taller than the fence, and you work from the old wood outwards, cutting out the canes that fruited last summer and tying the new ones to the wires in pairs, the way he showed you.

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Mrs Okonedo from the next farm leans on the gate with a flask and tells you the dead canes are easy to spot, grey and split at the tips. You scrape one with your thumbnail anyway, just to be sure, and the green underneath is a comfort you did not expect. The frost has taken the top of the blackberry hedge and the yard is white with rime, but the raspberry rows hold their colour like something stubborn that has decided not to go quiet.

Near the gate you find a cane with a small pale bud at a leaf joint, far too early for the month. Mrs Okonedo squints at it and says it is one of the autumn-bearing kinds Dad planted the year before he got ill, and that they will sometimes push out a late flush if the mild spell holds. You think about the summer your sister sat on an upturned crate with a bucket between her knees, red to the wrists, eating more than she picked.

You leave the bud alone. You tie the cane to the wire with a strip of old tights, check the knot twice, and walk back across the yard with the secateurs warm in your hand, the brash piled by the gate behind you.