Two photos: a fine line V-shaped band tattoo on a wrist on the left, and a black and grey blackwork band with a large flower across a forearm on the right.

Wrist V-band and floral forearm band

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a single thin black outline forming a V-shaped band around the wrist, with clean, even linework and plain skin around it. The right panel shows a solid black band wrapped around the forearm, with white-outlined flowers, petals and leaves cut into the dark background in a blackwork style. Both images are in black and grey, and the photographs are framed side by side against dark backgrounds.

Fine line Blackwork Botanical Forearm Other Band Wrist band Flower Peony Leaves Petal

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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

The peonies came up out of the Ashdown clay the week after the fair packed up, and nobody in the village would touch them. Mrs Fenwick said the roots had been fed on sawdust and sideshow blood, which was nonsense, but I dug them anyway, because the bulbs were mine to sell and the rent was due at Michaelmas.

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I kept a ledger of every bloom. Seventeen pale heads by June, each one with its petals folded tight as a fist, and on the stem beneath each a hairline of green that ran round the stalk like a cuff. I pressed the first between two sheets of blotting paper and wrote the date beside it in pencil. When I lifted the paper the flower had left a ghost on it, a dark outline of petal with the middle gone white, as if something had been cut away and the shape held in place by the shadow around it.

The travelling man came back on the last Sunday of the month. He stood at my gate with a canvas roll under his arm and a V of black thread knotted at his wrist, and he asked whether the flowers had opened properly. I told him they had, and he nodded, and unrolled his canvas on the gatepost. Inside was a drawing of a peony band, black ground, white bloom, the same cut-out petals I had pressed in my notebook.

"You pay the leaves back," he said, "or you keep them." He tapped the V at his own wrist and smiled without showing his teeth. I left the gate open and went in to fetch the scissors.