Fine line colour tattoo of a slender wildflower sprig with orange blooms and blue-grey leaves on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Small wildflower sprig on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A slender stem rises up the inner forearm with two orange-red flower heads near the top and small blue-grey leaves and buds along its length. The linework is very fine and the petals and leaves use soft, watercolour-like shading with gentle gradients. The palette is restrained, with warm oranges set against cool blues on pale skin, and the sprig is placed centrally against a dark background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Wildflower Flower Sprig Leaves Stem Bud

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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 spoil heap above Hollin Pit had been grey for as long as anyone could remember, so when you saw the first orange flower pushing through the shale in March, you crouched and looked at it for a long time before you touched it. Your father would have called it a weed. Mrs Rudd at the Co-op would have called it a sign, and she would have been pleased, because she was always pleased about signs.

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You picked a single stem and carried it down the lane in your coat pocket, past the chapel and the back yards where the washing hung stiff with coal dust. The blue-grey leaves climbed the stem like something drawn in pencil and softened with a thumb, and the buds were so small they looked like pinpricks of frost. At the kitchen table you laid it on a folded tea towel and sat with it until the light went off the window.

The men came off shift at six and found you there, still at the table, the petals slowly opening in the warm air. Your brother said nothing. Your mother touched one flower with a fingertip and said she remembered a patch of them behind the old fever hospital, before the tram line closed. Nobody in the village had walked that way in years.

The next morning you climbed back up the heap with a trowel and a jam jar. The wheel at the pit head was turning slowly in the distance, and the ground beneath the shale was warmer than you expected. You dug where the stem had come from, and the roots came up pale and knotted, already more of them than you could count.