Black and grey fine line tattoo of a single flower with dotwork shading in the bloom, a long stem and two leaves, on the inner forearm.

Single flower with stem and leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a single open flower on a long, thin stem with two leaves, one on each side of the stem. The petals are outlined in fine black linework, and their shading is built up with dense stippled dots, especially in the centre of the bloom and along the leaf edges. The design is in black and grey only and sits on pale skin against a dark leather background.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Forearm Flower Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week of August the Pennick orchard had gone heavy and quiet, the Bramleys sagging their limbs toward the grass, and Nell Pennick walked the rows each dusk with a tin pail and a pencil stub in her apron pocket. Her father had sold the top field to the cider people, so the lower rows were all she had left to count.

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The poppy came up in the gap where the old wall had fallen. It was a single bloom on a thread of stem, and it had no business being there, between the drop line of windfalls and the nettles. Nell knelt, sketched it on the back of a seed invoice, and shaded the centre with dots of pencil, one by one, because her mother had taught her that a petal is only as true as its shadows.

Her father came along the row with the sprayer on his back and stopped. He did not pull the flower. He stood with the mist hanging behind him and said the wind had brought it over from the Lyle farm, and that it would be gone by Michaelmas. Nell said nothing. She looked at the leaves, one curled on each side of the stem like hands cupped around something quiet.

It was gone by Michaelmas, as he said. But the seeds dropped into the cracks of the wall, and the next spring, when the apples were only green knots, there were three poppies where there had been one. Nell kept the seed invoice folded in her tin pail, its dotted petals gone faint, and every August she counted the rows again and left the gap alone.