Botanical tattoos
Plants, leaves and branches — drawn to the direction the body already gives, rather than to how they look on paper.
A plant on skin is a problem of direction before it is a problem of drawing. A branch that curves with the line of the forearm looks like it grew there; the same branch copied off a sheet and laid straight looks stuck on. So the design is settled against the limb, not before it.
Not every plant works. What rests on thin layers of tone fades before what rests on structure, so we lean toward shapes with a clear line — a leaf, a stem, a thorn — and leave the delicacy to the spacing rather than to the colour.
