Colour botanical tattoo of a coffee plant branch with white flowers and red berries on the upper arm.

Coffee plant branch on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a coffee plant branch with glossy green and olive leaves, clusters of small white flowers and red coffee cherries. Bold black outlines define the leaves and berries, with soft blended shading across the leaf surfaces. The branch sweeps diagonally from the upper arm down towards the elbow, filling the frame with a balanced, naturalistic composition.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Leaves Berry Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seedling had been in the case since Lisbon, and the mate was sure it would die before the Cape. Every morning Joaquim Teixeira lifted the lid, looked at the three leaves and shut it again, the way a man checks on a sleeping child. The captain said it was a waste of good glass. The cook said it was a waste of good water. Joaquim said nothing, because the gardener in Amsterdam who gave him the plant had told him plainly that if the tree lived, there would be coffee in a country where no coffee had ever grown.

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Somewhere past the Line the wind dropped for nine days and the ship sat on a sea like oiled slate. Water was rationed. Joaquim gave his share to the box, a tin cup poured slowly into the soil, and the men laughed at him until the second week, when a bud split on the lowest branch and opened into five white flowers. The cook swore they smelled like the orange trees at home. Nobody laughed after that. They came below in turns to look at it.

When the trade wind returned they raised the island on a grey morning. The governor's agent waited on the quay with a pen and a face like a shut door. He asked what was in the box. Joaquim told him the truth: a tree, and flowers, and in a year, if God and the damp allowed, small red cherries that would be picked, dried and roasted on a hundred hearths.

The agent wrote nothing down. He stood a long time over the glass, then asked whether the flowers would last the climb up the hill. Joaquim said they would not, but the berries would come after, and nobody would remember the flowers anyway. He lifted the case himself and carried it up the path, and behind them the sea went on lying flat, as if it had never once moved.