Small black fine line tattoo of a curling vine and a five-petalled flower on the wrist of a clenched hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vine and flower on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of a thin curling vine ending in a simple five-petalled flower sits on the wrist. The linework is fine and even, with solid black ink and no shading. The hand is clenched and rests on a blue fabric surface, and the photo is taken at an angle in dim light.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Vine Flower Swirl Leaf

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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

Hold still, and mind the bucket. Brother Aldous had the ladder against the south wall before the bell for Lauds, and a wet morning was not going to talk him out of it. The vine up that wall was older than the chapter house roof, so the old men said, and it had never once flowered where anyone could see it, only in the high corners where the sun gave up.

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One spring a novice called Tobias, who had a sharp eye and no patience, climbed up after the cutting. He found a single thin shoot had crept along a crack in the lime and come out at its very end with a flower no bigger than a thumbnail. Five petals, he counted, though the others swore it was six. Aldous told him to leave it be. A thing that grows where it is not wanted, he said, is usually finding its own way home.

Tobias did not leave it be. He tied a strip of linen to the coil of stem so the gardener would know it was not to be clipped, and he wrote the day in the margin of the herb book. When the abbot came round in autumn he looked up at the little ribbon fluttering and asked who had put it there. Nobody owned up. The vine was left, and the shoot curled on along the crack, one turn at a time, until it reached the sill of the scriptorium window.

Tobias grew old in the infirmary, and the linen rotted away long before him. But the vine still climbs, and the flower still comes out in that corner every May, and any brother who sits in the window copying psalms can look down and see the curl of the stem lying over the stone like a question nobody has got round to answering.