Close view of a fine line botanical tattoo of trailing green leaves and small buds on the upper arm of a woman in a striped top.

Trailing leaves and buds on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A trailing vine of pointed leaves and small budding flowers runs diagonally across the outer upper arm, with a few thin stems linking the sprigs. The linework is fine and the leaves are filled with muted green and grey-teal ink, with light shading on some leaves. The arm is shown against a plain textured white wall, with the shoulder of a striped top and long wavy blonde hair at the left edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Leaves Vine Bud Flower Stem Foliage

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the ladder against the courtyard wall and a bundle of ties in your teeth when the steward calls your name a third time from the colonnade. You do not come down. The vine you planted two summers ago has finally reached the cornice, and its stems are running sideways along the plaster as if searching for something. The leaves are pointed, dull on the underside, grey-green in the afternoon light, and the buds at the tips have swollen enough to split.

Keep reading

Lysandros wants the shoots pinched back and the wall left bare for the cloth merchant from Ephesus, who thinks green things are for peasants. You have been told this twice already. Instead you knot the longest stem to a cord and lead it across the gap toward the upper window of the copyist's room, where the shutter has stood open since spring so Phaedra can see her reed pen. The stem bends, hesitates, then finds the sill and grips it with a tendril as fine as a hair.

All morning the copyist works with a sprig of the small flowers tucked between the pages of her scroll. You can see her from the ladder, lips moving as she reads, one hand lifting now and then to touch a bud as if checking it is still there. When the merchant's party crosses the courtyard, they stop beneath her window and point up at the green curtain spilling over the wall.

Lysandros stops too, and his mouth opens, and you watch him decide that a bare wall would have looked far worse. You climb down slowly, the ties still in your teeth, and let him argue with the vine.