Botanical floral vine design in brown ink running up the outside of an ankle and lower leg, with white canvas sneakers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral vine design on ankle and lower leg

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A single-tone floral vine with stylised flower heads, leaves and curling scrolls runs up the outside of a lower leg from the ankle. The linework is bold and the shading is solid, with the design appearing to be henna or a temporary brown stain rather than black ink. The design is shown from a low angle against a light skin tone, with white sneakers and a blurred background.

Botanical Ankle Flower Vine Leaves Scroll Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paste had dried to the colour of wet earth by the time the bosun came down to the galley, and I had to scrape it off the bowl with my thumbnail before he would believe I had not been sleeping on watch. Forty-one days out of Aden, the ship smelled of tar, hot bread and the dried leaves stacked in the bond store, which Captain Halloran insisted were medicine and not something for the crew to gossip about.

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My aunt taught me the vine when I was eight, on the back step of her house above the harbour. She made me start at the bottom, with one thin stem that climbed like it had somewhere to be, then the leaves in pairs, then the curls that tightened at the ends like fists opening slowly. The flower heads came last, always. "Leave the big ones till the stem is sure of itself," she said, and I never understood what she meant until the paste was on my own wrist and the lamp was swinging and the stem kept wandering off the line.

The captain found me at the second bell of the middle watch with a bundle of leaves in my lap and a stain up to my elbow. He did not shout. He turned one of the packets over in his hands, read the Liverpool merchant's name on the tag, and said the dye would have been worth more to a dealer than to a boy with a pot. Then he asked me to show him the flower, and I did, and he traced the curl of it with one finger, very carefully, as though it might come off.

In Liverpool the stain would be going orange at the edges, and by the time we docked it would be almost gone. I watched the vine fade on my wrist as the cliffs of Ireland came up grey through the rain, and I thought about the packets in the bond store, each one tagged for somebody's hands, and the captain's face when he decided to say nothing at all.