Botanical ampersand line drawing
Botanical · Black and grey · Flash
A single ampersand symbol is drawn in dark grey linework, with its strokes formed from sprigs of leaves, small flowers, buds and berries. The drawing uses fine, detailed hatching and outlines on a light, textured paper background. The symbol sits centred in the frame with plenty of empty space around it.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The ferry only ran on Tuesdays that spring, so the seed packets stacked up in the boathouse beside the crab pots and coiled rope. I was the one sent to sort them, because Ada would never trust a label written by anyone else. She kept her records in pencil on the backs of old tide tables, and every page held a pair of things pressed flat between the same sheet: sea holly and samphire, bramble and thrift, the wild sweet pea that grows only where the wind cannot reach it.
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I thought the pairing was fussy until I found the box under her bed. Inside were forty years of pressings, and on each one a loop of stem curled round both plants, the way a cursive ampersand curls over its own tail. When I asked her why, she said nothing on this island grows alone, and a name on its own is just a weed with ambitions. Then she laughed and told me to stop being so serious about a bit of pondweed.
The last sheet was blank except for a single hawthorn sprig, its berries gone dark, and beside it a line in her pencil: Nell & Ada, spring. I had not known she'd put my name on anything. I sat on the upturned dinghy a long while with the tide coming in, then fetched my own notebook from the hook by the door, pressed a bramble stem beside her hawthorn, and wrote the label the way she would have.
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