Fine line botanical tattoo of wildflowers and grasses in red and green with black dotwork on the inner forearm.

Wildflower sprig on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A forearm carries a sprawling bouquet of wild grasses, feathery stems and small red blossoms, drawn in fine black linework with dotted accents. Green watercolour-style washes give the foliage a soft, loose finish. A small solid black diamond and dotted guide lines sit at the upper left, and the bouquet tapers down the arm against a plain grey background.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Forearm Wildflower Grass Flower Foliage Stem Diamond Dot

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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

Mind the third step from the top, it has been loose since before my grandmother's time and nobody has got round to it. Come in and shut the hatch, the wind up here carries dust that tastes of iron. Now, you want the story of the green seed, and you'll have it, but you'll have it the way my mother gave it to me, which is slowly.

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The Ardent Mare was eleven generations out from the old blue world when the gardeners found grass growing where nobody had planted it. A single green blade had pushed through a crack in the lower grow-tray and kept on climbing toward the lamps. Pell Osei, who kept the ledgers and could not abide a mistake in them, went down with a torch and counted nine red blossoms along its stems. Nine, she wrote, and then underneath, in a smaller hand, unaccounted.

The ledger said the year's ration was fourteen thousand grams of protein paste and not one gram for weeds. So the grass was pulled, and the blossoms were pressed flat between sheets of glass, and the glass went to the children. Every winter after, the little ones drew a black diamond on the frost of the port window and ran dotted lines from it toward whichever star they could name, because that was what the lines were for, showing where a thing was headed rather than where it had been.

Pell died with the ledger open on her knees and a pressed flower under her thumb. The last entry in her hand reads only: nine, still nine. I have the glass plate myself, and on a clear night, if you hold it up to the lamp, the red comes back through the dust like something that has decided to stay. Give me your hand. Not that one, the one you write with. There, now you have seen it, and you can say you were told.