Colour botanical tattoo of pink gum blossom, a red waratah flower and green eucalyptus leaves across a shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eucalyptus and waratah across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows pink eucalyptus blossoms with brown buds, a large red waratah flower with a textured seed head, and long green gum leaves on a thin brown branch. The linework is clean, with soft shading on the petals and leaves that gives them a naturalistic, botanical-illustration look. The design wraps from the top of the shoulder down onto the upper arm, with the flowers framing the shoulder blade area.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Branch Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frank Cordle had told the surveyor twice that the ridge would burn back green, and twice the man had written it down as a joke. By March the whole escarpment above Kurrajong Gap was black stumps and ash that squeaked under boots. Mae walked it anyway, carrying the biscuit tin her grandmother had left her, the one with the broken hinge and seeds rattling inside like dice.

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She had gathered them in the autumn from a waratah the size of a kitchen table, its red heads gone brown and hard as walnuts. Her grandmother's rule was to keep one seed for every year you had lived somewhere, and to plant them where the soil remembered fire. Mae had never counted her own years there. She counted gum buds instead, pinching the little grey caps off the eucalyptus to see whether the trees had started again under the bark.

At the old creek crossing, a single gum had put out pink blossom from a limb nobody thought was alive. The bees were already working it, loud as a radio in an empty room. She knelt and pressed three waratah seeds into the grey ash with her thumb, then sat back on her heels and waited for the rain that had been forecast all week.

It came the next morning, sideways and cold, and she stayed out in it until the tin was empty and her hair ran down into her collar. The surveyor's map would say the ridge was lost. When she told Frank, he only said to give it a season, then went inside to put the kettle on.