Black and grey botanical tattoo of lupin spikes, dahlia-like blooms and leaves spreading from the collarbone across the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey flower cluster on the upper chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of flowers and leaves sits across the collarbone and upper chest, with tall spiked blooms on the left, a round dahlia-style flower in the centre and a smaller bloom below. The linework is crisp and the petals are shaded with smooth grey gradients and stippled detail. The design is entirely in black and grey ink against pale skin, with a plain white background behind the shoulder.

Botanical Realism Chest Shoulder Flower Dahlia Bloom Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dahlias came off the boat from Oban in a wet paper parcel, tubers the colour of old potatoes, and Ruth Gilchrist stood on the quay with her hands in her cardigan pockets and said they would never take on Eilean Beag. Everyone on the island had tried dahlias. The wind found them every time.

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I had the lupins already. Mrs Kerr's blue ones had seeded along the dyke behind the post office, spikes thick as a child's wrist, and I'd been collecting their pods since August in a biscuit tin. Ruth thought lupins were weeds. I thought the same of her, and we spent that autumn arguing over a strip of ground behind the kirk, the only sheltered patch on the whole machair.

By June the dahlias were up, leaves dark as wet slate, and the lupins had risen beside them, tall and stubborn. Then the gale came in from the west, two nights of it, and in the morning the dahlias lay flat in the mud. Ruth stood at the wall with her wellies full of water and said nothing. I went to the shed for the stakes without being asked, and she followed me with the twine, and that was the end of the argument.

By August the dahlias stood higher than the lupins, great round heads like the ones in the photograph on the kirk hall wall, and bees on every one. Ruth brought a jar of honey up to my door without a word. I still have the biscuit tin. Some of the pods are in it yet, waiting for a patch of ground that needs them.