Colour tattoo of a blossom branch with pink and red washes and black script on the side of a ribcage.

Blossom branch with script on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A branch of blossoms with loose pink, red and purple washes and ink splatter runs down the side of the torso. Black script runs alongside the branch and is partly legible, reading in part as "is such a heavenly way to die". The soft, painterly shading contrasts with the crisp black lettering, and the design sits diagonally across the frame against the skin.

Botanical Ribs Blossom Branch Flower Petal Script Quote Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The branch turns up behind the flour bin on the third morning out of Kobe, its blossom already browning at the edges. Fenwick the donkeyman swears he bought it for a girl in Liverpool who stopped answering his letters, and you tell him the galley is no place for sentiment. Still, you tip the petals into a tin pan and set the stalk in a jam jar on the shelf above the range, because nothing else aboard is pretty and the crew needs something to look at besides the grey sea.

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The glass falls off the Cape in a single night. By two in the morning the cook's lamp is swinging on its hook and every man who can't sleep is standing in your doorway asking for tea. Fenwick comes last, wet to the collar, with a lifebelt under one arm. He says the second mate has ordered the boats swung out and you should come now. You tell him you'll finish the stock first, and he looks at you the way you'd look at a man who has decided to drown on purpose.

The water comes through the scullery plates at half past three, and it reaches your ankles before you think to lift the pan off the hob. When the last boat pulls clear, Fenwick's lantern is a small yellow coin bobbing on the black. You stand in the flooded galley with the jar in both hands, and the blossom has come loose in the wet and drifted off the stalk. Several petals float on the water around your boots, pale pink, as if the whole ship were wearing them out to the sea.