Back view of a shaved head and neck covered in black botanical tattoo designs of flowers, leaves and scrolls, with a person in a magenta top outdoors.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral pattern across a shaved head and neck

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A person is seen from behind, lying outdoors among green foliage, with a shaved head and neck covered in dark floral designs. The motifs include flower heads, leaves and paisley-like scrolls, drawn with fine, even lines and some solid shading. The ink is near black against pale skin, and the pattern wraps from the crown down the side of the neck, with the magenta top in the lower frame.

Botanical Neck Other Flower Leaf Scroll Paisley Floral pattern Vine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chairs in, the lot of you, and mind the trestle, it's older than your marriages. You were at this school the summer the vine came over the wall, so you'll remember the smell of it in June, sweet as cut hay and twice as stubborn. Nobody planted it. Hettie Crane swore a jay dropped the seed from the bottom of its beak, and nobody argued, because she was the only woman in the parish who wrote letters to the council and got answers back.

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Hettie kept the garden behind the chapel, all scroll and tendril, bindweed coiled round the bean poles and roses let go so wild the lane smelt of them. The vicar called it untidy. She said things grew whether you let them or not, and the art was learning which way they wanted to go. When the Pryce boy came home from the mill quiet as a closed door, she gave him a trowel and a row of onions and never asked him a single question. By autumn he was training the vine up the arch himself, leaf by careful leaf.

Then the council came with their clipboards and their talk of damp walls, and wanted the whole thing scraped to brick. Hettie stood in the lane in her wellingtons and told them the vine was holding up the wall, which was a lie, and that the wall would fall if they touched a leaf, which was also a lie. They left her to it. She died in the hard winter with her hand on the arch, and the vicar buried her where she asked, under the scrolls.

So when the chapel was sold for flats last spring, the vine came down in a single piece, roots and all, and I watched it go onto the back of a lorry with a leaf still caught in my collar. Pass the sherry, Dennis, and I'll tell you the last thing Hettie wrote to the council, which was only: leave it be, it knows the way.