Black and grey botanical tattoo of three wheat stalks with long leaves running down the inner forearm of a person wearing a striped top and cream shorts.

Wheat stalks on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three wheat stalks with long, tapering leaves run down the inner forearm, with the grain heads at the top and the stems fading towards the wrist. The linework is dark and defined, with soft grey shading along the stalks and leaves. The image is a close crop showing the arm against a pale wall and a dark background, with no face visible.

Botanical Forearm Wheat Leaves Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smells of urn tea and floor polish, and the name badges have been printed in a font that makes everyone look like they work for the council. You spot Ruth Pemberton by the raffle table before she spots you, which is how it always went at Hollins Primary, where you were the one who hung back. She still walks with the same long stride, though now it crosses stubble fields instead of the playground.

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You both remember the summer you were eleven, when the combine had cut her father's field down to pale stubble and you crept in after dark to see what the rows had left. You chewed the milky grain from the heads and got chaff stuck between your teeth. Mr Pemberton caught you at the gate with a torch and said nothing at all. He handed you a stalk instead and told you wheat never forgave a late sowing, and that if you wanted to know how a plant was getting on, you looked at the leaves, not the head.

You tell her you never went back, not properly, not even at Christmas. She nods as if she has already guessed, then unzips her tote and pulls out a bundle of dry stalks tied with green twine. The field is going to a company that wants to put panels across it, she says, and her father is dead, and there is nothing left to cut. She presses the bundle into your hands. The heads rustle and shed a little dust onto your good jacket.

Across the hall someone calls out the raffle numbers, and the room fills with scraping chairs and laughter. You hold the stalks up to the strip light. The leaves taper down towards the stems the way they always did, thin and sure, and for a moment the hall is only the sound of grain shifting in your hands, like a tin of coins being counted in another room.