Two-panel photo of a botanical tattoo on the inner forearm, showing a cluster of red flowers and green leaves on thin stems in a soft, painterly colour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red flowers and green leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of small red flowers with a few buds at the top, with two rounded green leaves and a long thin stem trailing down the forearm. The linework is fine and the colour is soft, with light shading that gives the leaves some depth. The design sits diagonally across the inner forearm against a plain light background, with a sleeve pushed up above it.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Flower Red flower Leaves Stem Bud Floral

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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

Mairead had the cutting wrapped in wet newspaper inside her coat, and the ferry from Oban was already rolling beyond the breakwater when she remembered the kettle was still on at her mother's. She did not go back for it. The island boat ran only once a week, and the skipper, Tam Brodie, had a face like a closed gate and no interest in her troubles.

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The geranium had come from the windowsill of the old schoolhouse, where a red cluster had lived for forty years in a tin painted green. Nobody on Sula had ever planted anything else in that tin. When the schoolhouse was sold to a couple from Glasgow who wanted it for holidays, they took the furniture and left the plant on the step with a note asking someone to take it. Mairead took it.

On the crossing she sat on a coil of rope with the stem across her knees, watching spray come over the bow. The leaves were rounder than she remembered, scalloped like the edges of a good biscuit, and where the stem bent she found a bud still closed tight as a fist. Somewhere past the Sound she decided she would not plant it by the cottage. She would plant it at the top of the machair, where the wind came hardest, because a thing that survived that would survive anything.

At the jetty Tam tossed her bag onto the concrete and gave a short nod. She stood there a while with the wet paper against her chest, then walked up the track toward the stone wall, where the first pink thrift was already breaking through the grass, and she knelt in the sand and began to dig.