Botanical tattoo sleeve on a forearm showing succulents, fern fronds and small pink flowers in soft, muted colour.

Succulents and ferns on a forearm sleeve

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The sleeve covers the forearm with succulent rosettes, fern fronds climbing from the elbow, and small pink flowers with a bud near the wrist. The linework is soft and the leaves are shaded with grey and green, giving the rosettes some depth. Muted greens, pinks and greys fill the composition, which runs from the upper forearm down towards the wrist.

Botanical Forearm Succulent Fern Flower Leaf Bud Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Lark had carried coal up the Trent for forty years before Ada Pell thought to plant anything on her roof. She started with a cracked chimney pot someone had left by the lock gates, filled it with grit and a broken bit of slate, and pressed in a cutting of houseleek she had taken off a wall in Gainsborough.

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Her husband Tom said the roof was for coal dust and rope, not for gardens, and the lock-keeper's wife said houseleek brought bad luck to boats. Ada only nodded and kept watering. By the second summer the rosettes had grown fat and grey-green, layered like the scales of something asleep, and ferns had come up in the damp seam between the planks where the sun never reached.

When the river flooded that October and the Lark tore loose at Torksey, Tom went under the stern and did not come up for a long while. Ada stood on the roof with the rain running off her hat, holding the chimney pot in both arms, because it was the only thing on the boat she could carry. The fern fronds slapped the rail in the wind.

They found the Lark two miles downriver, wedged in the reeds with her cabin full of water and her roof still green. Tom sat on the bank with a blanket round his shoulders and said nothing for an hour. Then he asked whether the houseleek had lived. Ada said it had. She did not tell him she had been talking to it all the way down the bank, the way you would talk to a dog that had kept its nerve.