Black and grey botanical sprig tattoo with hatched leaves and small berries on the back of a person's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical sprig on the back of the neck

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A sprig with a central stem, several hatched leaves and clusters of small stippled berries runs vertically down the back of the neck. The linework is dark and detailed, with fine hatching in the leaves and dotted shading on the berries. The image is a black and white close crop with the tattoo centred against pale skin and a grey top at the bottom edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The master wanted the myrtle drawn before the ink dried on the Alexandrian copy, so I sat on the cistern step with a reed pen and a jar of soot ink while the sun slid behind the lighthouse. Hermias had cut the sprig that morning from the wall behind the gardeners' hut. Its stem was the colour of old rope, and the leaves came off it in pairs, each one folded along a vein like a letter nobody had finished reading.

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He would not let me use the grey wash. "Hatch it," he said, tapping the first leaf with his knuckle. "Light comes from the left. Every line you draw is a vein, so draw it tight enough that the shadow believes it." I did as I was told for three days. My fingers blackened to the second knuckle. The berries were the hardest. He wanted them stippled, one dot for each seed, and by the second evening I had counted nineteen clusters and lost count of the dots.

On the last morning the clusters were already going soft at the tips. Hermias carried the sheet to the window, held it against the harbour glare, and said nothing for so long that I began to apologise for the hatching. Then he laughed, took the pen from my hand, and added one tiny stroke at the base of the stem, a clean little cut where the sprig had been snapped from its mother bush.

"Now it looks like it was taken," he said. "People trust a thing more when they can see where it was pulled from."

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