Colour botanical tattoo on an upper arm, showing a circular wreath of vines and leaves with a pink flower, blackberries and a feather.

Botanical wreath with flower and blackberries

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A circular wreath of vines, leaves, a pink-brown flower, a cluster of blackberries and a striped feather sits on the upper arm. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with shading that gives the leaves and feather depth. Muted greens and browns dominate, with the flower and berries adding soft pink and purple, set against a plain skin background.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Leaves Vine Wreath Blackberry Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the hedge above Polwithen by its thorns first. The bramble takes hold of your sleeve and will not let go until you have said something civil to it. By the second week of September the berries have turned from red to a purple so deep it stains your fingers for a day, and you have filled two baskets for the Mary Tallack, which sails on the morning ebb with the wind in the north-east.

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Tom Pascoe comes up the lane with his sea-chest on one shoulder and a striped feather tucked into his hatband. A kestrel's, he says, that landed in the rigging off Finisterre and refused to leave until the cook gave it a crust. He wants a wreath for the forecastle, something green to look at through fourteen months of grey water, and he wants you to make it. You cut the long canes, bend them into a ring, and push a pink dog rose in at the top where the stems are strongest. He sucks at the blood on his palm and calls you a cruel woman. You tell him the thorns are the only honest part of the job.

The feather goes under the last loop with its tip pointing down toward the sea. Tom takes the wreath in both hands, careful as a man carrying a full dish, and walks off down the steps without looking back, which is how you know he means to come home. In the spring a letter arrives in a hand you do not know, the bosun's perhaps, to say the ship is safe at Valparaíso and the men have hung the ring above the galley stove where it dries slowly in the heat.

The berries go black on the beam and the rose keeps its colour longer than anyone expected. Nobody in the letter says where Tom went after the fever, and you do not ask. Instead you walk up to the hedge with your basket, pick one plump berry still warm from the sun, and eat it standing where the lane turns to the sea. Then you walk back down with the basket on your hip, the juice drying dark on your fingers, and count the days until the next ship.