Black and grey botanical tattoo of a rose with forget-me-not sprigs and leaves on the forearm, shaded with fine hatching.

Rose and forget-me-not bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bouquet of a large open rose, a smaller rose bud, several clusters of five-petalled forget-me-not flowers and leaves, arranged in a vertical composition up the forearm. The design uses bold black outlines with fine hatching and stippled shading to give the petals and leaves depth. It is rendered entirely in black and grey ink against pale skin.

Botanical Forearm Rose Rose bud Forget-me-not Flower Bouquet Leaves Botanical

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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

You learn the cargo by its smell before you learn its name. Down in the hold of the Marguerite Lowe, somewhere past the Azores, the bales of wet paper give off a sweetish rot, and Mrs Okonedo's seed tins rattle against the iron ribs every time the swell turns. She has four hundred packets of forget-me-not bound for a nursery in Bristol, and one crate of cuttings she will not let anyone else touch. You are nineteen and the only one aboard who has ever kept a garden alive, so she hands you the crate and a pencil and tells you to draw every label before the ink runs.

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The drawing is the job. Each morning you sit on an upturned bucket by the galley hatch and copy the blooms from a rose cutting she has pressed between two boards, its open face gone the colour of weak tea. You trace the petals with a steel nib and a bottle of Indian ink that refuses to dry in the damp, and you learn that a rose is mostly argument: the outer petals fold back and the inner ones curl forward, and the shadow lives in the creases. The forget-me-nots are easier. Five petals, a yellow eye, a cluster that never quite lines up. You fill the margins with them until the pages look like frost.

In Bristol the nursery man opens the crate, sniffs the rose, and says the cuttings are dead. Mrs Okonedo only nods at your sketchbook, turns to the bouquet you drew on the last page, and asks if you can make a plant look like that on a boy's forearm, the way the sailors do in the port houses. You laugh, then stop, because she is already holding out the rose's stem as if it were a wrist to be measured.