Black line tattoo of a botanical plant with umbel flower heads and feathery leaves on the inner forearm, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Umbel plant sprig on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black line drawing of a plant sprig with a cluster of umbel-style flower heads at the top and a branching stem with feathery leaves below. The fine, even linework is unshaded, with small areas of solid dots in the flower heads. The tattoo sits on a pale forearm beside a rolled black and white gingham sleeve against a green background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Plant Sprig Leaves Stem Herb

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fennel had gone to seed along the chapel wall before the manager thought to ask why Mrs Tallack let it grow. Every spring she cut the feathery tops and sent them down the shaft in the tins, wrapped in brown paper, because her husband had heard the old men say dill sweetened the damp. Joss went down in the February of the big fall and came up on a board, and after that she stopped cutting. The stalks rose higher than the wall, and their flower heads opened flat, like a row of hands held up to show there was nothing in them.

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When the company wanted the wall pulled down for a new engine house, Mrs Tallack stood in the gap with a bread knife and said the plants had been growing there longer than the company's paper, and they would stay until the seed dropped on its own. The men laughed until they saw she was not joking. The foreman's boy, Cyril, who had been coughing since the summer, was sent to fetch her home. She sat him on the step and told him to count the rays on each umbel, one by one, because a child who could count to a hundred without losing his place would not lose his breath either.

He counted all afternoon. The men carried their tools back to the shed without being told. By dusk the boy had reached the seventh umbel and his chest had loosened enough for him to laugh at a joke about the foreman's moustache, and the foreman, who had heard it through the door, went home without giving the order.

Mrs Tallack kept the wall. The fennel still grows there, though nobody sends it down the shaft now, and the children of Wheal Maud still count the rays before they are let out to play.