Solid black blackwork leaf tattoo on the forearm near the wrist, with sharply lobed edges against pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Solid black leaf tattoo on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a stylised leaf or flower with sharply lobed edges and a pointed tip at the top. It sits on the forearm close to the wrist, with the fingers curled at the top of the frame. The shapes are filled with flat black ink, with fine internal lines suggesting veins and no grey shading, set against a plain pale wall.

Blackwork Botanical Forearm Leaf Flower Foliage Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass above Haldane Fell had three ways down, and Marta kept the one that went through the wet larch wood because the goats knew it. She was counting them that morning, before the cloud lifted, when she found the leaf caught in the fence wire at the second stile. It was black, or it looked black against the grey light, and its edges were cut into points like a fern that had been folded too many times. She turned it over with the end of her stick. The underside was the same black, no paler vein running through it, only a few fine lines pressed in as if someone had drawn on wet slate.

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Her grandmother had said the old plants on the high ground did not hold colour the way lowland things did. Everything up there went dark to keep the frost out, and a leaf that had gone dark enough could cross the pass without being seen. Marta had thought it nonsense when she was nine and was still thinking it nonsense now, but she pinched the stalk off and tucked the leaf inside her sleeve, against the wrist, where the pulse was.

By the time she reached the shepherd's hut the goats had scattered and the cloud had come back down. Oskar was inside with the stove going, fighting a cough. She showed him the leaf and he laughed at her, then stopped laughing when the stove hissed and the leaf, pressed flat on the table, lifted its lobed tip toward the door as though it could smell weather.

They left it on the sill. In the morning the goats were back, the cloud had gone, and the fence wire was bare. Oskar swore the hut had never had a plant inside it. Marta said nothing, but she kept the way through the larch wood, and each time she passed the second stile she looked for the dark leaf on the wire and did not find it.