Colour botanical tattoo of a green eucalyptus leaf with pink blossoms on a person's arm, with a dark outline and a dark chair in the background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eucalyptus leaf and blossom on an arm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A green eucalyptus leaf hangs diagonally from a thin stem, with a cluster of pink eucalyptus blossoms at its lower end. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft green and pink shading that gives the leaf and flowers some dimension. The tattoo sits centrally in the frame against pale skin, with a dark chair and fabric visible behind the arm.

Botanical Forearm Leaf Blossom Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper has gone home, so the Mary Lou sits in the chamber with the gates shut behind her and the river hissing out through the sluices. You have the stern line looped twice round the bollard and your palms are already raw. Dessie is up in the wheelhouse swearing at the gauge, and the old gum on the bank drops another shower of bark onto the deck, curling like paper.

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She came down the Murray with a bucket of blossom, Dessie says, the summer her husband drowned upstream, and she hung it from the rail so the crew would have something to smell besides diesel. Pink fluffy heads, clustered at the end of a stem as thin as fishing line. Every morning you sweep the fallen ones off the deck and lay them along the gunwale in a row, the way she used to, and by Thursday the galley smells like a cough sweet and a summer afternoon.

On the last night before the Wakool bend, a single leaf comes loose from the overhang and lands on the water beside you. It is long and green and slightly curved, like a sickle or a tiny boat, and it turns once in the eddy before the current takes it. You watch it go until the dark swallows it. Dessie says that's how you know the river has accepted you, and you don't argue, though you suspect he's just tired.

When the gates finally open, you cast off with a sprig of blossom tucked behind the wheelhouse glass, its pink heads already browning at the edges. The water runs ahead of you, carrying the smell of gum leaves all the way down towards the sea.