Forearm tattoo of grey seed heads on tall stems above a shaded geometric star, with vertical orange and yellow streaks running beneath, in a botanical and geometric style.

Seed heads and geometric star on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo runs down the forearm and combines tall, thin-stemmed seed heads drawn in soft grey shading with a dark, faceted geometric star around an open circle. Below the star and beside the stems, vertical streaks in orange, yellow and red fade out in a watercolour-like wash. The composition is dominated by the grey botanical forms at the top and the central star, with the colour acting as a background accent.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Seed head Wildflower Circle Stripe Watercolour wash

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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

The seed packets were the problem, not the knife. The man had forty-one paper envelopes in a biscuit tin, each labelled in pencil with a plant name and a date that hadn't arrived yet. Wild carrot, teasel, a grey thistle nobody at Corrow Bridge could name. I told him the tin would have to be opened on the bench, and he sighed the way men do when they have already decided to be patient with you.

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Opening it took an hour. Teasel heads are spiny and they shed, and by the end my desk was dusted with a fine grey that looked like ash. He watched without speaking. At the bottom lay a folded card with a star drawn in black ink, a hole punched through its centre, and one line beneath: 'Plant where the light comes up orange.' He said his sister had drawn it after a winter counting sunrises from a hospital window, and that the streaks behind the far hills were the colour she wanted the seeds to remember. The card was on no list. I stamped the tin cleared anyway, because the list had no column for light.

Three springs later a letter reached the post office asking after a field I had never seen, teasel standing higher than a man, and at its edge a stripe of orange where the ground had been turned. I walk down there most mornings now with a flask. The sun lifts behind the bridge and the seed heads stand against it, grey and fine as the strokes on that card, and the field keeps coming back without anyone's permission.