Black and grey fine line tattoo of a small sprig with a stippled flower head and leaves on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small botanical sprig on inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small botanical sprig with a fluffy, stippled flower head, a thin straight stem and several leaves. The fine linework is thin and precise, while the flower head is built up with dots and light shading. The black ink sits in the centre of a plain white background, with a dark sleeve framing the arm at the left.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Forearm Sprig Flower Stem Leaves Plant

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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 porter at Holloway Bridge halt always said the sprig had come over on the milk train in a tin of wet sand, wrapped in a dead man's handkerchief, and that nobody in the village had the sense to throw it away. Old Ada Merrin took it home in her apron and set it in a jam jar on the waiting room sill, where the pigeons could not get at it.

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It grew. By the second spring it had a stem as straight as a signal wire and leaves fine as a wren's tail feathers, and in March it put out small balls of yellow fluff that smelled of honey and coal smoke. Ada said it was a stranger that needed a train to take it home. Every Tuesday she carried it along the platform and showed it the rails, and the children laughed at her, and the stationmaster let her.

The winter the line closed, she was the last to leave. She set the jar on the bench under the timetable and waited for the 4.10 that never came. The stem bent once in the frost, then stood up again. When the new road was laid over the cutting the bench was taken away, but the sprig was not found in the rubble, and nobody could say who had carried it off.

Some say it went north along the old track on its own, root and all, and that you can still see it on the embankments in March, leaning a little towards the sea. Ada would have said it simply knew the way.