Botanical-style black scrollwork vine tattoo with small pink leaf accents on the side of a hip and thigh.

Black scrollwork vine with pink accents on a hip

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo of a flowing black vine with curling scrolls and leaf-like shapes runs from the hip down the side of the thigh. Bold black linework forms the main swirls, with finer strokes and some solid fills, and small pink accents appear among the leaves. The curved composition follows the shape of the body, and the photo is taken at a close angle with dark clothing at the top and grey fabric at the bottom.

Botanical Thigh Scrollwork Vine Swirl Leaf Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vine had already crossed three decks by the time Oyelaran found me in the hydroponics bay, her boots printing wet ovals on the grating. Nobody had told the ship's gardeners that the root stock would climb. We had engineered it to hold the ribs of the hull and stop the spin from shaking the seed vaults loose, and it had done exactly that, then kept going, looping along the conduit like ink poured in reverse.

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Mine was the bay nearest the spine, so the problem was mine. I walked the stems with a torch in one hand and a cutting knife in the other, reading the curls the way my mother had taught me to read tide tables on the old dock. Each scroll ended in a fat black leaf, solid as a coin, and between them the thin tendrils fanned out like the last of a wave going back to sea. Where the vine had found the pale membrane of the coolant lines, its tips had turned pink, a colour we had never catalogued, as if it had tasted something sweet.

Oyelaran wanted the whole run torn out. Forty metres of growth, the cutters said, was forty metres of unpredictable load. I asked for a week. She gave me three days and a look that said she would remember it.

On the third night I cut one tendril at the second bend, where the scroll curled back on itself, and wrapped its end in wet cloth. I carried it aft to the seed vault and pushed it into the one tray we had kept empty for emergencies. By morning the pink had gone to a bruise, then a bud, and the bud had already begun to curl toward the light we did not have. The cutters came at dawn with their saws. I stood in the bay and watched the black scrolls drop like ash from the ribs, and I did not look back at the tray, where the first curl was already reaching for the wall.