Black and grey fine line tattoo of a small leafy sprig with stippled leaves on the inner forearm, shown against a dark sleeve and pale wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small leafy sprig on the forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small sprig with a slender central stem and several pointed leaves sits on the inner forearm. The leaves are drawn with fine outlines and dotted stippling, with no solid shading, and the stems are a single thin line. The image is black and white, with the dark sleeve on the left and a pale wall on the right framing the arm in the centre.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Forearm Sprig Branch Leaves Foliage 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

Mrs Pollard at the post office had told everyone the Harrow boy would never come back from Korea, so when the envelope arrived with a Japanese stamp and no return name, I assumed it was a mistake and nearly fed it to the stove. Instead I carried it up the hill to my mother's kitchen, where the kettle was already on, and opened it at the table with my thumb.

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Inside was a sprig of something pressed flat between two sheets of rice paper. Fine stems, leaves like little spearheads, each one dotted with the faintest pencil stipple where the veins should be. No letter. Just a note in capitals: IT GROWS BY THE WELL AT TOMURA. KEEP IT ALIVE IF YOU CAN.

My mother said it was bamboo, or the grass that passes for bamboo in a dry year, and that it would not survive a Hampshire winter in a flowerpot. I had never heard her so certain about anything that was not a pie crust. Still, I took a cutting from the back windowsill of the chemist's shop where I worked, potted it in a jam jar, and set it in the one patch of sun the shop got before noon.

It lived. By the spring of 1954 it had three slim stems and a stubborn way of leaning toward the window, and I had begun to think the note was written to nobody in particular. Then in June a man in a grey suit came in asking for aspirin and stayed to read the labels on the jar. He said the leaves were right. His brother had drawn them on the inside of a cigarette packet in a camp near the Imjin, he said, and that was the only thing of his that came home. I watered the jar that evening, and I have watered it every evening since.