Colour neo-traditional tattoo on a thigh of a grey jar labelled Deadly Nightshade, held by a green stitched hand with purple smoke and a flower below.

Deadly Nightshade jar held by a stitched hand

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A glass jar with a dark lid and the words Deadly Nightshade on its grey label is held by a green hand with stitches and dark red nails. Purple smoke curls behind the jar, a yellow and gold shape sits at the lower edge, and a pink and purple flower appears at the bottom of the frame. Bold black outlines define the forms, with smooth shading on the jar and hand.

Neo-trad Thigh Jar Hand Stitches Smoke Flower Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jar had been wrapped in oilcloth for nine weeks, and when Tobias Brisk finally unwound it in the lee of the galley, the label had gone soft at the corners like a biscuit left in the damp. Deadly Nightshade, it said, in the surgeon's cramped copperplate. Below it, someone had pressed a thumbprint of tallow.

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Dr Pell had bought it in Valparaiso, where a dealer swore the leaves were gathered under a full moon and would ease the captain's gout. Nobody aboard had asked why a man so fond of his own fingers kept a poison within reach of the ship's boys. After the storm off the Horn cracked the lid, Nell Garrow, the cook, sewed a glove of green sailcloth over it and stitched the fingers so they curled round the glass as though it might be taken back. 'Leave it,' she'd said when Tobias reached for it on the third night out. 'Nobody needs it opened.'

He held it up to the lamp. The leaves inside were grey and whole, and when he tipped the jar an inch they rustled like paper. Nell had poured the real stuff into the bilge a month after the Horn and filled the jar with dried mint from the galley shelf, and she had never once told the surgeon. The purple haze on the glass was only the stove's reflection.

He set it back beside the biscuit tin, let the stitched hand keep its grip, and went up to tell the mate the wind had backed to the south. Below, the jar went on pretending for a ship full of men who needed it to believe.