Black botanical vine design with leaves, flowers and scrolls wrapping around an ankle, shown with a white flip-flop and a toe ring.

Floral vine design on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black floral vine runs up the side of an ankle, with leaves, a large five-petalled flower, and curling scrolls with small dots. The linework is bold and solid with no shading, and it looks like a henna-style design rather than a permanent tattoo. The image is a close, slightly angled shot of a bare foot on a paved surface, with the design filling the left side of the frame.

Botanical Ankle Vine Flower Leaves Scroll Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marisol's stall sat between the chip van and the lifeboat tin on the Sandwick front, and by ten in the morning the queue already ran past the bench. Her grandmother had taught her to mix henna the old way, the paste left overnight under a tea towel, lemon and sugar wrung over it to hold the colour. Marisol never sketched first. She let the brush find the vine, the way her grandmother had let the sea find the harbour wall.

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That Tuesday the customer was a woman from the caravan park who wanted a vine running up the side of her ankle, leaves shaped like arrowheads and one wide five-petalled flower where the bone sits. Marisol worked slowly, pressing the scrolls tight and dotting seeds into the gaps. The woman asked how long it would last. "Two weeks if you swim a lot," Marisol said. "Three if you don't, and you don't look like a woman who sits still." The woman laughed and paid in coins from a purse with a broken clasp.

Across the bay, the old lighthouse on the point had ivy climbing its white tower, and her grandmother used to say the keeper's wife had planted it the winter the keeper drowned, so that something would keep climbing when he could not. Marisol had never believed it. She looked at the ivy now and thought that a stain only knows what you ask of it, and that she had asked for something that would fade.

By Friday the henna had gone the colour of weak tea. The leaves held on longest, then the scrolls thinned into faint loops. The dots went first of all, the small seeds that had never quite taken, and the woman in the caravan park never came back to ask for them to be darkened again.