Black ink botanical ornament of leaves and tulip-like shapes wrapping around a forearm near the wrist, against a white brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical leaf ornament on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical botanical design of stylised leaves and tulip-like buds sits around the wrist and lower forearm. The linework is fine and even, with some areas of light shading inside the leaf forms. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and is centred on the wrist against a plain white textured wall.

Botanical Forearm Leaf Tulip Flower Ornament Vine Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, exactly as it had in 1998, and Dean Pryce was still telling anyone who would listen that he had once been the best at pencil shading. I let him talk. I was looking for Ruth Abbott, who had sat beside me in Mr Ashdown's art room for five years and who, in the last week of Year 11, produced the only drawing he ever pinned to the corridor wall without comment.

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It was a tulip ornament, mirrored down a central line like a moth's wing, buds bending toward each other around a stem nobody could quite find. She had drawn it in biro because the pencils were locked away after the fire drill. Every line was even. Mr Ashdown stood in front of it for a full minute, then walked on without a word, and we all pretended not to have noticed him noticing.

I found her by the urn, and there it was on the inside of her forearm, the same drawing grown up and inked in grey. The leaves curled down toward the back of her hand as though someone had pressed a stamp into soft clay, and the shading inside the petals was so soft it looked like breath on glass. She saw me staring and laughed. "Two sittings and a small fortune," she said. "He'd have failed me for the shading."

"He'd have framed it," I said, and we stood there a while, listening to Dean explain the difference between HB and 2B to a woman who had clearly heard it before. Ruth tugged her cuff back down over the buds. "The stem was the bit I left out on purpose," she said. "Thought I'd keep it for myself." I looked at the empty cup in my hand and realised I still had the biro drawing folded in my jacket pocket, and that the stem was still missing from it.