Colour tattoo across the upper back of a fine-line Art Nouveau style woman with autumn vine leaves, grapes and green swirling tendrils.

Art Nouveau woman with grape vines on back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman in a flowing dress stands in profile, holding a green swirling stem, with a wreath of autumn leaves and grapes in her hair and framing her figure. The linework is bold and shaded, with detailed highlights on the skin, fabric and foliage. Warm reds, oranges and browns sit against green tendrils and a soft grey background, with leaves spilling down toward the lower back.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Woman Vine Leaves Swirl Figure Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cuttings had been wrapped in wet sacking since Bordeaux, and by the fortieth day below the Line you have stopped expecting them to live. Mr Ferrand's order is chalked on the crate lid in his cramped hand: eleven bundles, Grenache and Carignan, to be planted at Quillota before the rains. Each morning you check them by lantern light, thumbing the bark for any give.

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The ship rolls and the hold smells of tar and damp wool. Old Pell, the carpenter, says the leaves have gone to rust and you ought to throw them over the side. You don't. You sit on an upturned cask and sketch the bundles in the margin of the manifest, the way your mother drew tendrils in the margins of rent books, long curling lines she never quite finished.

On the sixtieth morning a green shoot has pushed through the sacking, pale and curled like a question mark. Beside it the older leaves have turned copper and cinnamon, with the last plum-coloured fruit still clinging to their stalks. Pell whistles. The hold is dark, but when you lift the lantern the whole bundle seems to glow, as though someone carried a September up from France and kept it folded away in the cargo for you.

At Valparaíso the wharf is blazing with midday heat. You carry the bundles up the gangway with your sleeves rolled, and the leaves rustle like silk. Ferrand meets you at the foot of the quay, hat in hand, and asks whether they survived. You tell him they did, and that they have quite forgotten which hemisphere they belong to. You watch him decide not to ask what you mean.