Black ink drawing of a skeletal hand with sprigs of flowers and leaves rising from the wrist, in a botanical flash style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal hand with botanical flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed line drawing shows a skeletal hand with its fingers extended downward, while leafy stems and blooming flowers spray out from the wrist. The linework uses fine outlines and dense hatching for the bones, leaves and petals. The design is rendered in black ink on a plain white background with the subject centred on the page.

Botanical Skeleton hand Bone Flower Leaves Blossom Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third stair, it gives under a heel. Sit yourself down, the kettle's only just gone off, and I'll tell you about the hand while the pot brews. My husband never liked me telling it in the parlour. He said guests came for the sea air, not for Fenwick's bones.

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Fenwick was head gardener at Stoke Hall, up the cliff road, back when the hall still had a garden worth the name. He had a sister, Ada, who died the winter the herring boats stopped coming in, and she left him a paper packet of seed and one rule: plant something that flowers in the dark, or plant nothing at all. He took it the way he took everything, to the letter. Every spring he dug a row of campion and bluebells along the kitchen wall, and every spring the frost had them.

The autumn he went into the churchyard, the sexton found a letter in his coat asking to be buried with his right hand above the soil, where the earth could take the rest but he could still hold something up to the light. Nobody believed he meant it. They did it anyway, out of kindness. Come May the bed under that wall was thick with blossom, stems climbing out between the knuckles and wrapping the wrist like a bracelet. The old men said Ada's seed had finally found the one place it was meant to be.

So when the lodgers ask why I won't let anyone prune that wall, I tell them the hand has the best of the blooms and it would be rude to cut them. Drink your tea, love. The sea's loud tonight, and if you listen hard you can hear Ada laughing, though I'll not swear it isn't the wind.