Black and grey shaded daisy tattoos on the inner forearm, one large and one partly hidden by a wrist bangle, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two daisies on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two daisy flowers are tattooed on a forearm, one large bloom below the wrist and a smaller one partly covered by metal bangles above it. The petals are drawn with fine linework and soft grey shading, with a dark dotted centre on the larger flower. The photograph is taken outdoors against a blurred green background with a vignetted edge.

Botanical Realism Forearm Daisy Flower Bloom Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The prior wants the daisies drawn before the frost, and you have until Lauds tomorrow to get the centres right. Every attempt comes out as a grey smudge, a pencil bruise, and Brother Oswin stands over your shoulder in the cold scriptorium saying that a daisy is not a sun and should not be made to look like one.

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So you walk out past the cloister to the wall where the lawn gives way to long grass. The sheep from the far fell have cropped everything short, and the daisies crouch between the tufts with their petals folded back at the edges like the sleeves of a tired habit. You kneel in the wet and count. Forty-one petals on the one by your boot, though the old herbal says thirty-two. You count again. Forty-one. After that you stop caring what the herbal says.

You carry a single flower back in your palm, roots still wrapped in a clod of earth, and set it under the lamp. You draw the rim first, the ragged ring of tiny strokes where the florets have not yet opened, and you notice the dots are not dots at all but short fine lines, each turned a fraction from the last, like hands on a clock nobody has wound. The centre is a field of them. Press too hard and it goes black; lift the nib and it vanishes into the vellum. You learn the pressure by breathing out slowly.

When the bell for Lauds sounds you are still bent over the sheet. Oswin reads it, says nothing for a long while, then turns to the margin where the herbal's first scribe drew a sun with a face. He takes your pen and beside it draws a plain daisy, its centre so light the page seems to hold it. "Leave the face off the sun," he says. "Let the flower be the flower." Then he goes to ring the bell, and you sit with the clod of earth drying on the desk while the first grey light comes in across the petals.