Colour botanical tattoo of a gold cross wrapped in flowers, leaves and a ribbon on the forearm, shown beside its black line drawing.

Floral cross and ribbon on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The left panel shows a healed colour tattoo on a forearm: a gold-brown cross with a pale circular centre, surrounded by muted green leaves, mauve flower buds, a pale pink ribbon and a twisted cord. The right panel is a black line drawing of the same design on white, with stippled shading and hatched detail on the petals, leaves and cord. The composition spreads diagonally up the arm, with the ribbon trailing down towards the wrist.

Botanical Forearm Cross Flower Leaves Ribbon Rope Bouquet Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mab Corran carried the bunch of hellebores up Tanner's Row in the rain, the cord biting into her palm, past the shuttered chandlers and the cathedral where the night watchman coughed under his coat. The cross on the iron gate had been gilded once, and the round glass at its centre had gone the colour of weak tea. Her grandmother had told her it held the town's lamps in, and that every winter someone must bind a sprig to it or the lamps would go out one by one down the hill.

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She knelt in the wet at the foot of the gate and knotted the cord, then the pale ribbon, the way it had always been done. A cart rattled past and the carter lifted his hat to the cross without looking at her. Nobody in the Row had ever asked why the flowers were always the white-faced ones that bloom before the thaw, or why the ribbon was never red. Those were questions for people with warm houses.

When she stood up, the glass showed a lamp burning in it, though no lamp was lit on the street. Behind the flame she saw her brother's face, younger than she remembered, holding a lantern at the harbour mouth on the night the boats did not come in. She asked the glass the question she had walked up the hill to ask, and it gave back nothing but the flame, steady and patient as a held breath.

She went home without looking back. By morning the ribbon had come loose in the wind and slid down the wall into the gutter, where the drain carried it off towards the sea, pale as a fish. The cross stayed where it was, and somewhere below it, one window on the hill went dark and then, very slowly, lit again.