Painted illustration of a retro-style camera framed by blue forget-me-not flowers and green leaves, shown as a design on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Camera and forget-me-nots design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A painted camera with a dark lens, a rainbow stripe and a brown top sits at the centre of the image. Blue forget-me-not flowers with yellow centres and dark green leaves wrap around its lower half and spread out to the left and right. The soft, layered watercolour-style shading is set against a plain cream background.

Botanical Camera Forget-me-not Flower Leaves Lens

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell kept the box camera under her coat, the way her mother hid bread from the guards during the strike. Every Thursday the milk train stopped at Lowmere Halt for forty seconds, and every Thursday a man in a grey coat stepped down from the third carriage, looked up at the signal box, and climbed back on without a word.

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She took his picture each time, quick, from behind the water tank. The lens was small and dark and it saw only what she pointed it at. Her father said a camera keeps what the eye lets go, which was the first thing the old people of the valley said about cameras, and the second was that you should never photograph a man who is leaving. Nell did not know whether that was true. She only knew the man wore a blue ribbon knotted at his wrist, the same blue as the flowers growing in the cinder beds along the embankment.

Through the autumn she pressed forget-me-nots between the pages of the timetable, and in the darkroom under the stairs the man came up grey on the paper, one print after another. In the last one the flowers had climbed the platform posts, wrapped round the bench, and spread across his shoulders. Nobody else had seen the flowers growing there, so she told no one.

On the last Thursday of October she set that print on the signal box sill beside a jar of picked blooms and waited. The milk train came in. The man stepped down, saw the picture through the glass, and stood still while the guard blew his whistle twice. The train waited. Nell swung the lamp. He did not get back on.