Black linework botanical vine tattoo with leaves and curling tendrils across a woman's back and upper arm, seen from behind.

Botanical vine tattoo across a back and arm

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair tied up is seen from behind, showing a large black linework tattoo of climbing vines, leaves and curling tendrils across her upper back and down onto her upper arm. The fine lines and stippled dots give the leaves and scrolls a delicate, shaded look against the skin. The photograph has a warm sepia tone, and the tattoo fills the left and centre of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Back Upper arm Vine Leaves Tendril Scrollwork Dot Woman Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull that chair nearer, love, and mind the trolley, it's got a wheel that squeals like a kettle. You'll want to hear this with the lights down, because that's how Dennis Platt told it to me, and he was never one for bright rooms. This was the winter the east windows of Ward Seven wouldn't shut, the old sashes swollen with damp, and nobody had pruned the ivy climbing the outside of the building since the Coronation.

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One night in February a single tendril came through the gap in the sluice room window. Dennis found it at half two, curled round the handle of a bedpan rack, fine as a hair and pale as a moth. He cut it with the scissors from the dressing trolley and dropped it in the sink. Next night there were two. By the Thursday there were a dozen, threading across the floor tiles like someone trying doors in the dark. Tommy Oakes in bed four said he could hear them ticking on the lino, and the nurses laughed at him, until they didn't.

Dennis stopped cutting after that. He tried to tell the night sister the thing was looking for something, and she said of course it was, it wanted water like everybody else. But he watched it. Every tendril bent toward the little green lamp at the nurses' station, the one that glows all night over the drug cupboard, and every morning the leaves had crept an inch closer along the corridor.

The last night he worked there, the lamp went out in a power cut, and in the morning the whole vine lay flat along the window glass, leaves pressed against the dark, waiting. Dennis said it was the only time he ever heard the ward quiet enough to hear the plants breathing. Then the lights came back on, and the green fingers lifted again, reaching for the lamp.