Black and grey fine line cosmos flower with a long stem and small cursive script on an upper arm.

Cosmos flower with script on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single cosmos-style flower with soft grey shading on its petals and a thin dark stem that runs diagonally down the arm. A short line of cursive script sits beside the stem, and the wearer's upper arm and grey top fill the rest of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Flower Stem Script text Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin arrived on the Tuesday boat, its lid sealed with brown tape and a cosmos stem pressed flat inside a ledger page that had once been a receipt. Agnes Pell had not seen a cosmos since her husband's sister brought them over the garden wall in July, and she had not expected anyone still to be sending them. She read the note tucked under the lid twice before she understood it had been meant for someone else.

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Dear Ruth, it began, and went on about the gravel road above the quarry, how the seed heads opened only when the wind turned south, and a plot by the chapel where a man had been burying his wife's favourite things. The hand was small and slanted, the ink smudged where the writer had licked a thumb to turn the page. Agnes folded it back along its crease. Ruth had died in March, according to the parish paper. The letter was dated May.

She sowed the seeds in cracked pots on the back step, though the frost would come soon and take them if they woke. Each morning she tested the soil with one finger, the way her mother had taught her, and each morning it was still bare. Then, on the ninth day, a green hook pushed up through the grit, and by the end of the week it had two leaves like wet paper and a stalk that leaned, always, toward the kitchen window.

She wrote to the address on the envelope before the first hard night. The reply came back a fortnight later in the same slanted hand: the chapel plot was hers to tend now, and the seed was for whoever kept the gate. Agnes walked up the quarry road with a trowel wrapped in a tea towel and a fresh tin under her arm. The first bloom had opened against the stone, pale as a washed cup, and she knelt beside it and began to dig.