Black and grey botanical tattoo of two daisies with shaded leaves on the forearm just below the elbow.

Two daisies with leaves on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two daisies overlapping diagonally, with a cluster of hatched leaves behind them and a third leaf tip at the lower edge. The petals are drawn with fine outlines and shaded lines, and the centres are built up with stippled dots. The design is in black ink and greys against a plain dark background, with the arm lit softly from the left.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Daisy Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The daisies came up through the coal dust on the towpath below Stoke Lock the spring my father stopped speaking to the lock-keeper. Nobody planted them. Mum said they had come in on the boots of the navvies who rebuilt the wall, and that a daisy will grow anywhere a boot has been, which was the sort of thing she said when she wanted a conversation finished.

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Our barge, the Patience, was forty-two feet of tarred oak with a stove that smoked whenever the wind came off the water. I spent that summer drawing with a stub of carpenter's pencil on the backs of old invoices. I drew the daisies each morning while the kettle sulked. Every petal I shaded in short strokes, the way Mum had taught me to shade a hull, and at the centres I pricked dots with the point of a nail until the paper looked like frost.

By August the leaves had come up behind the flowers, long and serrated, and I hatched them until my wrist ached. Dad saw the drawing on the table and said nothing, but the next morning he went up the bank with a trowel, dug three plants out of the verge, roots and all, and wrapped them in a wet sack. He set them in a tin bath on the roof. The lock-keeper came down to see what the fuss was and found us both kneeling there, not speaking.

We moved on at the end of the month with the daisies riding on the roof. At the next lock Dad finally said that it was a poor drawing of a daisy and handed me the pencil back. I have it still. The petals are wrong and there are too many leaves, but the dots at the centre are right, and those were the part he had watched me do.