Fine line black tattoo of a wild flower sprig with leaves and seed heads on the inner upper arm.

Wildflower sprig on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A botanical sprig of wildflowers with umbel-style heads, slender stems and small leaves runs up the inner upper arm, with a dotted cluster of seed heads near the top. The linework is thin and mostly single-needle, with light stippled shading on the flower heads. The tattoo is in black ink only against the pale skin, and it is framed by a dark top on the left and a grey background on the right.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Wildflower Sprig Leaves Seed head Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on your knees in the frost-stiff verge below Hollins Barn, stuffing dead umbels into a paper feed sack before the wind can take them. Your grandfather's gloves are too big at the fingers, so every time you reach for a stalk the cuff slides back and the cold bites your wrist. Mrs Pryce from the chapel committee wants the seed heads for the school nursery in Knighton, and she has paid you in advance with a jar of damson jam and a promise not to mention to anyone that you were out in the lane on a Sunday.

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Your grandfather called these lace-heads wild carrot and nothing else, and he would not let you pick a single flower in May because the bees needed them more than the vase did. In January they are a different thing. The rays have curled inward like the fingers of a hand closing on something small, and every head holds a hundred seeds that will sleep under the hedge until somebody turns the soil. You shake them into the sack one by one, listening to the faint dry rattle.

Near the gate the ground dips where the old stone wall fell, and there you find a sprig half-buried under last year's leaves, its stems grey, its flower heads pale as old paper. You remember your mother pressing a spray of this between the pages of the almanac the week before she went to Shrewsbury and did not come back. You had thought it lost with the rest of her things.

You tip the sack onto the kitchen table, then unfold the almanac and lay the sprig beside the seeds. The kettle starts to tick. You sow nothing this year, but in March, when the frost lifts off the verge, something green pushes through the wall rubble anyway, and you leave it alone.