Fine line black botanical sprig tattoo with round flower buds and slim leaves on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small botanical sprig on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender sprig with a single stem, several small round flower heads and buds, and a pair of narrow leaves near the base. The linework is thin and even, with the flower heads filled in solid black. The ink is black on pale skin against a plain light background, with a white sleeve at the top right of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Sprig Flower Bud Leaves Stem Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every September the wind off the harbour strips the last of the tansy from the wall behind the scullery at Gull Rock House, and every September Mr Hollis from number six asks me whether I am letting it go to seed on purpose. I tell him it is not my doing. It was Eddie's. He planted it the spring we took the lease, because his mother swore by it for keeping flies out of the larder, and for thirty years he cut three stems each morning and stood them in a milk bottle on the breakfast table, the little yellow heads bright as coins against the grey of the bay.

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After he died I stopped cutting it. The stalks grew leggy and tangled, and the flower heads dried to hard brown buttons that rattled when the door was slammed. I left the bottle in the cupboard with its cork in it. Guests came and went. Some asked what the plant was called, and I said I didn't know, which was a lie of a sort, since I had only forgotten the Latin Eddie used to say with such pleasure.

Then one morning in October there was a bundle on the front step, tied with garden string and wet with dew. Inside were a dozen fresh sprigs, each one neat and green, with the buds still closed tight at the top. There was no note. Mr Hollis was already walking away down the lane with his stick, not looking back, and I knew without asking that he had been out at first light cutting from the wall behind the scullery, which I had not known was still his to reach.

I filled the milk bottle at the sink, set it in the middle of the breakfast table, and laid one extra place, which I had not done in a long while. When the room was full of the smell of toast, I counted the flower heads on the nearest stem. There were seven, and one bud still closed, waiting to see whether it would open.