Fine line black botanical tattoo of a thin wildflower stem with two seed heads and small leaves, on the inner forearm.

Small wildflower stem on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A slender stem rises diagonally across the forearm, with two round seed heads at the top and a few small leaves along its length. The linework is thin and single-tone, with no shading, and the design is small and placed centrally on the arm. The skin is pale and the background is a brightly coloured painted wall, which contrasts with the dark ink.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Flower Stem Leaves Seed head Wildflower

Find an artist for this

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 wind off the headland always took the seed heads first, so Dad made me go out before breakfast with a jam jar and a penknife. I was nine and thought the job was daft. The stems grew in tufts along the cliff path, thin as hair and no taller than my knee, and each one ended in a round grey head like a clock nobody had wound.

Keep reading

Once the sun was properly up the heads would puff and the seeds would go over the edge, out past the rocks where the crab boats came in. Dad said every one that flew was a bit of the island leaving home. He trimmed the lamp, kept the logbook, and kept a tally in pencil of the seeds he had saved, which he never let me read.

The autumn I turned fourteen I went out alone, cut one stem, and carried it up the spiral stairs to the lantern room. Dad was asleep in his chair with the shipping forecast murmuring on the radio. I pressed the stem flat between two pages of the log, the way he pressed the names of the gulls, and left it on the brass rail where the beam would catch the dry heads when it swept round.

In the morning the stem was gone and the log lay open at that page, with one grey seed stuck to the ink. Beneath it, in pencil, Dad had written the date and five words: one more made it out. I still have that page. The rest of the jar went over the cliff with the wind, and I have never once been sorry.