Black line drawing of a curling vine with five-petalled flowers and leaves on a white background, a botanical tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Black flower vine with swirls

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black botanical design of a single vine winding diagonally down the page, with spiralling tendrils and several five-petalled flowers. The linework is bold and uniform, with solid black fills on the petals and leaves. The design is shown in black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Vine Flower Swirl Leaf Tendril Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had taken the top half of the wall in February, so by April I was up the ladder with a bucket of lime and a grudge against the weather. Nobody on Inchkerry planted anything on the north side because the salt would burn it. But the clematis my mother put in the year I was born had ignored the salt for forty years, and it had gone sideways over the stones, feeling along the mortar for a way down to the harbour.

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I tied it back as I went. Its tendrils were stubborn, curling round my wrist before I'd let go of the last loop, and each one wanted to coil into a spiral rather than lie flat. Mum used to say the plant was showing off. Every time it found a crack it put out a flower, five dark points like a starfish the sea had forgotten to finish, and I stopped to look at them longer than the job needed.

By the third day the wall was whole and the vine had found the gap above the slip where the boats come in. Mrs Reid from the shop came down with her dog to see what I'd done, and said I'd made it look as if the plant had meant to climb there all along. I didn't argue. I was thinking of the ferry timetable pinned in our kitchen, the one Mum never threw out, with the Thursday crossing circled in pencil.

On Thursday I cut a length of stem, wrapped it in wet newspaper, and carried it down to the boat with the lime still under my nails. The skipper asked what it was for. I told him it was going to the mainland to grow up a wall that had never seen a gale.