Colour botanical tattoo of pale flowers and grey-green leaves across a shoulder and upper chest, with red and blue flowers tattooed nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical flowers and leaves on chest and shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A botanical tattoo of two pale pink and cream flowers with grey-green leaves spreads across the shoulder and upper chest. The shading is soft and smooth, with darker tones in the leaves and lighter highlights on the petals. Red and blue flowers are visible at the neck, upper arm and right chest, and the background is dark and out of focus.

Botanical Shoulder Chest Flower Leaves Botanical Rose Peony

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule refused the bridge above Caddon Gap, so I unloaded the cuttings myself, wrapping each stem in wet moss and tucking the bundles inside my coat where my body heat would keep the sap from stalling. Forty-one of them, taken from the old quince hedge behind the abbey at Lhauri before the frost came down early that year. The leaves were still grey-green on their undersides, the colour of river stones, and the buds had only just split to show pale pink edges and cream throats.

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Brother Anselm met me at the hut with a lantern and the face of a man who had given up on the cuttings. He had written in March that the abbey's graft-stock had rotted in the wet, and that nothing grew in the valley now but nettles and rumour. I told him the wood was alive if he would stop fussing over it and fetch the bone-handled knife.

We worked by lamplight, cutting wedges into the rootstock of a wild briar that had forced its way up through a cairn. My fingers would not hold steady, so he kept the bindings tight while I slid each scion home and wound the raffia. By the third hour the wind had dropped and the snow had stopped, and the pass below us lay silver under the moon.

At dawn I found one of the briar's own shoots already bent and budding, a small pale flower open among the stones where no one had grafted anything. Anselm said it was the old stock remembering. I said it was only the cold, which makes plants do strange things to keep their seed. He laughed, and neither of us said that the valley would have to wait until spring to know whether any of it had taken.