Black and grey bamboo tattoo with tall segmented stalks and shaded leaves across a person's upper back.

Bamboo stalks and leaves on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Several tall bamboo stalks with segmented nodes rise up the upper back, with clusters of narrow, tapering leaves and fine twigs branching outward. The linework is soft and painterly, with graded shading that darkens the stems and gives the leaves a brushed, sumi-style look. The design is in black and grey ink on skin, with a white bra strap visible at the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Back Leaves Twig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The captain wanted rain on his cabin wall, and I told him bamboo does not weep. It bends. Nine weeks out of Yokohama the Halcyon Grace rolled through the swell like a drunk going home, and every dish of ink I ground went thick and sulky before the brush touched it.

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So I painted bamboo instead. I kept the hare-hair brush wet and dragged each stalk down in one breath, pressing hard at the base and lifting as I went, so the black thinned to grey the way smoke does when the wind takes it. Every node I left with a pause, a little knuckle of dark where my wrist had stopped. The leaves came last, quick flicks that tapered to nothing, twenty or thirty to a cluster, none of them quite matching, because bamboo never does.

Mr Oduya, the second mate, stood in the doorway each evening with his cap in his hands and watched me work. He had lost a brother off the Horn, and he never said so. He only asked whether the stalks would hold in a blow. I told him they bend all the way to the ground and come back up, and that was the whole secret of them.

The storm came on the eleventh night. Next morning the captain stood before the finished wall, water still dripping from his sleeves, and said nothing for a long while. I had left one stalk unfinished near the corner, its top leaves only sketched, so the wind could find its way through. He touched the bare patch of plaster with two fingers and said, "Leave that one." I did.