Small yarrow-style flower on an upper arm
Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo
A small black tattoo of a flowering plant with a flat-topped bloom, a slender stem and two feathery leaves sits on the outer upper arm. The linework is fine and the leaves are shaded with short hatched strokes, giving some texture. The image is a close crop with a blurred wooden railing and green garden behind, and the ink is the only colour.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The old woman who kept the crossroads well had a daughter called Ilse who was too quick with her tongue and too slow with her feet. When the lord's reeve came riding through in the dry month and demanded the village pay its wheat early, Ilse argued with him in the square until he laughed and said he would take her instead, as a servant, to carry his letters.
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Her mother did not weep. She walked out past the last field to where the yarrow grew thick along the ditch, its flat white heads holding the late light, and she cut one stem with her knife. She knew the old saying: yarrow stops the bleeding and it sends a rider back the way he came, if you lay it under his horse's saddle and say the right name over it. She did not know the right name, so she made one up, the name of her own mother, and laid the stalk in the dust of the road.
The reeve came back that night at a gallop, swearing that his mare had thrown him at the bridge and that he had seen a grey woman standing in the water. He left Ilse at the crossroads with her bundle and never came up that road again. Years later people said the yarrow along that ditch was always the first to flower, and that a girl with sharp words had only to pick one stem to be heard in any court in the land.
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