Black linework wildflower bouquet with soft peach shading on two blooms, tattooed on the forearm.

Wildflower bouquet on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bouquet of wildflowers with two open blooms, several small five-petalled flowers, buds and leaves, arranged on a diagonal stem across the forearm. The linework is dark and defined, with stippled and hatched detail in the leaves and petals. The two larger flowers have soft peach shading, while the rest of the design is black and grey, set against a striped woven rug.

Botanical Forearm Flower Wildflower Bouquet Leaves Stem Bud Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week out of Falmouth the bread had gone green at the edges, and you had stopped counting days and started counting flowers. Mr Pardoe, the ship's surgeon, had given you a tin of pressing paper and a commission from the gardens at Kew: bring back anything that grows at the Cape and nowhere in England. You had nothing to bring but patience, so you collected whatever the sailors dropped on the foredeck.

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On the morning the coast showed as a brown smudge on the horizon, Tobias Vane came to the rail with a fistful of stems he had pulled from a crack in the wharf at Simon's Bay. Dark stalks, he said, the colour of iron gall ink, and two blooms like a cheek after a slap of wind. He had carried them inside his shirt for a day and a night. You told him they would never survive the damp of the hold. He said nothing grows in a tin until somebody asks it to.

You bound them with thread and set them on the chart table under a lamp. Small five-petalled flowers opened along a side shoot, buds closed tight as fists, leaves hatched with the purser's fine pen. You drew them four times over, shading the poppies with a smear of rust-brown wash, until the page looked like a field seen from a mast.

When the ship came up the Thames the pressing paper had rotted in its tin, but the drawing was dry. At Kew a clerk asked what the plant was called. You said you had never learned its name, only the order in which it had come aboard. He wrote 'unknown, gift of the second mate' on the card and slid the sheet into a drawer, where it stayed for longer than either of you would have guessed.