Black and grey flower tattoo on an upper arm
Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo
A woman seated from behind in a salon, with long wavy balayage hair and an olive striped crop top. A black and grey flower tattoo with shaded petals sits on her upper arm, with a smaller partial tattoo visible on her other arm. The white tufted backdrop and salon chairs fill the rest of the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she has no time for your elbows. Nobody on Inishcarra had grown a red flower since the kiln burned in the year the Gallagher boys went out after the mackerel and did not come back. What grew instead was the grey dahlia, up the black slope where the fire had licked the heather clean.
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Tomas Ruadh was twelve that summer and sick of grey. His mother was to be married in the chapel at Dun Bay, and he wanted her to have something bright in her hair. So he went up the slope with a bucket of seawater and a spade, meaning to dig out a root and carry it across to the mainland where the seed shops were. The bloom watched him come. Its petals were shaded like a banked fire, darkest at the heart and paling to ash at the tips, and when he knelt to lift it the wind smelled of tar and salt and something sweeter underneath.
He never did dig it. He sat beside it until the tide turned, and he heard, the old people say, every name the sea had taken, spoken softly from among the petals. When he came down at dusk his hands were empty and his face was wet, but his mother said afterwards she had never seen him look so sure of anything.
So that is why the slope is grey, and why no one on this island plucks a dahlia. Go on home now. Mind the step, it is loose, and so is my patience.
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