Black and grey botanical tattoo of two roses, a lily and sprigs of foliage running up the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and wildflowers on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of two roses, a lily-like bloom and slender sprigs of small flowers and leaves climbs the forearm in a vertical arrangement. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading on the petals and leaves that gives them volume. The image is in black and grey on pale skin against a dark wooden background and a green top.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Rose Flower Lily Leaves Foliage Sprig Wildflower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate was due at the printer on Monday and the lily still had no throat. Hattie Quayle sat under the skylight above her uncle's chandlery in Saltcombe, pen held just off the paper, looking at the bloom the way the harbour looked at weather, waiting to be told what it meant. Below her the fishing boats knocked against the quay, and the gulls argued over the bins.

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Her uncle ran the nursery that sold seed and bare-root roses to half the parish, and every spring he sent her a list of what the catalogue needed. This year it was two roses, a lily he insisted on calling a Scots lily though it grew nowhere near Scotland, and whatever small flowers would fill the gaps. She worked in hatching, never solid black, each petal a grey wash over dark lines so that it seemed to curl away from the page.

On Thursday a woman came up the stairs with a cutting wrapped in wet newspaper. It had come from a garden on the cliff road, one her mother had kept for forty years, and the nursery had sold that family their first roses before the war. She wanted the bouquet drawn properly before the house went to auction. Hattie unwrapped the stem and found the lily's throat there, speckled and closed tight, the thing her own drawings had never quite managed to show.

That evening she took the plate back out and drew the throat in one slow stroke, leaving the sprigs at the top unfinished, the way they had been on the cliff, still opening. The printer would never know the difference. She sent the woman home with a tracing and kept the cutting in a jam jar on the sill, where it went on putting out small white flowers long after the catalogue had gone to press.