Black line-work floral tattoo with flower heads and leaves across a woman's shoulder and upper back.

Black floral design across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black floral design covers the shoulder and upper back, with several large blossoms, layered leaves and small teardrop-shaped buds on thin stems. The linework is bold and even, with dense filled centres and fine detail in the petals. The image is in black ink only, shown from behind against a warm, dim background, with a white halter top and a red patterned garment at the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Shoulder Back Flower Floral Leaves Blossom Bud Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Bramley by the gate had been dying for three summers before my uncle Owen let me take a knife to it. He said a tree that splits its own bark is only asking to be replaced, and I said I would rather graft it than cut it down, which was the kind of argument you can have at seven in the morning with dew soaking through your boots. We had cut scion wood in February and kept it wrapped in damp newspaper in the cold dairy, and by August the stock had thickened enough to take a bud.

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Owen showed me how to budding it. You made a T in the bark with the point of the blade, then lifted the flaps with the flat bone handle, never the edge, because bruised cambium forgives nothing. The bud shield came off the scion like a small pale teardrop, still attached to its sliver of wood, and you slid it under the bark and bound it tight with raffia. Ten days later you checked again. A good bud stayed green and plump. A bad one went black and shrivelled, and you had to wait another year to try again.

Most of mine went black. Only one held, and it was the one I had nearly thrown on the bonfire, cut from an unlabelled branch behind the wash-house where nobody remembered planting anything. Owen shrugged and said the old tree had no name anymore, so the bud would simply make whatever it liked. The next spring the Bramley put out clusters of white blossom on thin stems, and one lopsided branch bloomed a pink so pale it looked like it had been left out in the rain.

I still keep the first apple that branch gave, cut in half on the kitchen table in October. Its pips were arranged in a small ring, and I remember thinking they looked like the little buds we used to draw in biro on the back of the seed catalogue, all of us pretending we knew what was going to grow.