Black and grey blackwork and dotwork thistle with spiky leaves running down the inner forearm.

Thistle tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall thistle-like flower with a dotted, shaded seed head sits at the top of a long stem with spiky, lobed leaves branching down the forearm. The linework is bold and outlined, with stippled dots and solid black areas creating depth in the bract and leaves. The design is shown in black ink and greys against a dark background, centred on the forearm.

Blackwork Dotwork Botanical Forearm Thistle Flower Leaves Stem Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The thistle came aboard at Leith, tangled in a bale of Cheviot fleece that the bosun swore he would have shaken out before we cleared the Forth. By the third week south of the Line it had found the one seam on the foredeck where the tar had cracked and the sun never quite reached, and it had put up a stem as thick as my thumb. Mr Haddow wanted it pulled. Nobody would touch it, because every leaf was edged with spines that caught on rope and skin alike, so the cook took to watering it with the dregs from the coffee pot and the men took bets on whether it would flower before we rounded the Horn.

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It flowered off Tierra del Fuego, in the grey before a gale. The head opened like a fist unclenching, all hooked bracts and a crown of dark stippling, and the wind that tore the mainsail that night never once shook it loose. I lashed myself to the foremast with a length of spun yarn and watched it bend flat against the boards and rise again, stubborn as a Presbyterian. In the morning the stem was snapped at the root and the deck was salt-white, but the seed head sat whole in the scupper, black and spiky and unbothered.

I wrapped it in my oilskin and kept it in the breast pocket of my coat through the Azores and the Channel fog, until we tied up at the Glasgow quay in the rain. I did not give it to the ground straight away. I shook one seed into my palm and walked up the hill to my mother's garden, where the soil is poor and nothing grows unless it is willing to bite back a little.