Black and grey blackwork tattoo of two open flowers and leaves framed by a bold black triangle on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two flowers inside a black triangle on an arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two large open flowers with layered petals, stamens and leaves, drawn with fine black linework and stippled shading. A thick solid black triangle band wraps around the design, creating a geometric frame behind and beneath the blossoms. The work is in black and grey only, photographed close up on the inner upper arm against a blurred brick wall and patterned fabric.

Botanical Blackwork Upper arm Flower Rose Leaf Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Alma Dunmore sat at the drawing board in the back room of the Ashby nursery with a pencil behind one ear, while Mr Pell stood at her shoulder and complained about the frame. He wanted the two wild roses left open on the paper, the way the Kew men had drawn them, with nothing around them but white. She had cut a black card triangle that morning and pinned it under the blooms so the petals seemed to lean out over its edges.

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"It looks like a window somebody nailed shut," he said. Alma did not look up. She was stippling the stamens with the finest nib, one dot at a time, because the light in the room shifted every hour and the dots were the only honest thing she had to say about shadow. Outside a lorry reversed over gravel and the dog at the potting shed barked at the brick. She thought of the briars at Thorne, growing through the broken gate of her grandmother's paddock, where nobody had ever cut back the corner of the hedge because it had always been there.

The plate went to the printer in Norwich with the triangle still black. The proof came back three weeks later with the roses gone pale and the card soft at the corners, and Pell said nothing about it at all. Alma folded the proof into her coat pocket and walked the lane past the nursery gate until the church clock struck six.

At home she pinned it above the kitchen sink, where the window made its own small frame of wet glass. Pell's nephew came by the following Tuesday, looked at the sheet for a long while, and asked why the flowers seemed to be trying to get out. Alma wiped her hands on a tea towel and said that was the whole point of a frame.