Black and grey botanical tattoo of a carnation with a bud, stem and leaves running down the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Carnation with stem and bud on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink carnation with ruffled petals sits at the top of a long stem, with a closed bud and two leaves beside it. The linework is fine and detailed, with soft grey shading inside the petals and along the stem. The design runs diagonally up the side of the torso, with dark trousers visible at the bottom of the frame and a plain light background.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Carnation Flower Bud Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had already come down in sections by the time Nell Harker found the carnation in the wagon. It lay on the floor of the costume van, a stiff grey bloom wrapped in a page of the Yorkshire Post, and she knew at once it was the one Teodor had worn every night for thirty-one years, its stem wired to his lapel and its bud pinched shut like a fist.

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He was sitting on the caravan step when she came out, watching a boy from the village kick a ball across the trampled field where the ring had been. The cat act had gone in March. The elephant had gone to a farm in Lincolnshire with a woman who wept at the gate. What was left fitted into two lorries and a Ford with a cracked windscreen.

"You left this," she said.

"I didn't leave it. I gave it up." He turned it over in his big spotted hands. "A bud on a stem is only a promise, Nell. Keep the promise and you keep the flower."

She didn't understand him and said so. He smiled the way he used to before a trick he hadn't rehearsed, then pushed himself up from the step and went inside without another word. Nell stood in the wet grass a long while. Afterwards she filled a jam jar at the tap, stood the carnation in it on the caravan sill, and left the bud closed. In the morning the sign was down and the field was empty, but the flower had opened in the night, ruffled and dark, and it was the only thing in the whole site still doing what it had been made for.