Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a beetroot with leaves and trailing roots on the inner forearm, against a dark leather background.

Stippled beetroot on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A beetroot with broad, ruffled leaves rising from a round bulb, with a long tapering root curling down the arm. The bulb and roots are shaded with fine stippled dots, while the leaves use linework with dotted shading along their veins and edges. The design is shown in black ink and grey tones on pale skin, centred on the forearm against a dark background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Leaves Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gavin Ferris turned up to our twenty-fifth in a brown sports jacket with a carrier bag hooked over one wrist, and when he set it down on the buffet table between the sausage rolls and the sherry trifle, the bag was full of beetroot. Eleven of them, each the size of a cricket ball, leaves still on and trailing grit across the sausage rolls.

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"Remember Mrs Holloway's window box?" he said. I did not. He had been the boy who grew cress on wet kitchen roll in Year Three while the rest of us ate our crisps. He lifted one out and turned it under the strip lights, and its long root hung down like the tail of a kite, fine hairs catching the glare. "Forty years of keeping this going," he said, "and nobody ever asked what it was for."

Most of the room wanted nothing to do with him, so I sat with him by the coat rack while the DJ murdered a Oasis song. He told me the trick was patience and a bit of cruelty: you cut the leaves off, let the bulb sulk in the dark for a day, then give it the water it begs for. I said that sounded like Year Nine. He laughed so hard the sherry went down the wrong way.

I took the one he pressed on me home on the bus, cradled on my knee like a baby. On the kitchen windowsill it put out a fresh crown of leaves by the Sunday, pale stems pushing up through the water. I rang him to say so. He didn't pick up, and the voicemail was just the clink of a kettle, then his voice saying, "Told you. They always come back."