Back and side of a person showing a colour botanical tattoo of daffodils, blue and pink blossoms and foliage, with a swallow on the shoulder.

Floral back and rib piece with a swallow

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare back and side show a large floral tattoo of white and yellow daffodils, pink and purple blossoms and teal blooms, with green foliage running from the shoulder blade down over the ribs. A small swallow sits at the top left near the shoulder, and a line of small script lettering appears low on the side. The soft shading and pastel colours give the flowers a painterly, layered look across the curve of the body.

Botanical Back Ribs Flower Daffodil Blossom Foliage Swallow Bird Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you, and mind the lamp, it's the only warm thing left on this deck. Hollis Penhale carried a tin of daffodil bulbs round the Horn in his sea chest, wrapped in his mother's flannel, and he swore on her that they'd be in the Cornish ground before the spring was out. Fourteen months at sea. Every time we shipped a sea over the bow the tin came rolling out from under his bunk, and every time he crawled after it on his belly like a man chasing a dropped sovereign.

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Off the Falklands a swallow came aboard, blue on the back and rust at the throat, half dead from the wind. Cook wanted to wring its neck for luck, which is backwards, as anyone who's sailed knows. Hollis fed it crumbs from his biscuit, and it roosted in the rigging above the galley stove, and by the Line it was the only creature on the ship that wanted nothing from anybody.

Off the Horn the mate ordered every spare weight over the side, and Hollis stood at the rail with the tin clutched to his chest. The swallow came down and sat on his shoulder and wouldn't be shifted. He opened the tin that night and found the bulbs gone soft and grey, all but three. He potted those in a bucket of seawater sand on the foredeck, and bless me if they didn't push green through the grit, then yellow, then the palest cream you ever saw, with pink blossom from a packet of seed he'd bought off a Valparaiso barrow boy and teal blooms he swore were the colour of the sea at dawn.

We raised Penzance in April. Hollis walked up the lane to his mother's cottage with the bucket in his arms, and the swallow went ahead of him, circling the chimney pots like it owned them. What became of the flowers is another story and it's past my bedtime. But the bird, mark you, stayed on her gatepost until the kettle boiled, and then it went off to the cliffs without a backward look. Now. Hand me that lamp.