Black botanical vine tattoo with flowers, leaves and scrollwork running down the centre of a bare back, following the spine.

Floral vine tattoo down the spine

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A long vertical vine of flowers, leaves and curling tendrils runs from the nape of the neck to the lower back. The linework is solid black with some fine dotted details, and the design is built from repeated bloom shapes with open petals. The skin is the only colour in the frame, with a grey towel around the edges.

Botanical Back Vine Flower Leaves Scrollwork Spine Floral Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me those shears, and mind the gull on the rail, he's been eyeing your pasty since you sat down. Now. You want to know about the vine. Everybody wants to know about the vine, the day-trippers with their cameras, always photographing the wall instead of the sea.

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Old Tobias Penhallow planted it the spring his girl was born. Cuttings from a cottage up Fore Street, nothing grand, just a stem with three leaves and a curl at the tip. He set it against the seawall at the bottom of the lane and told anyone who'd listen it would reach the chapel roof by the time she was wed. It never did. It went sideways, the way things do down here, looping round the iron ring and sending out tendrils like a child reaching for a dropped coin.

Every summer it bloomed a little more, open cups of flowers with their petals spread wide, and the men said you could smell it from the bar on a still night. Tobias swore that was how his boat found the harbour mouth in the fog. Maybe it was. Maybe he just liked saying so.

The winter the Brenda Mae went down off the Gull Rock, the wall stood bare and grey, and Ruth Penhallow walked past it every morning with her hands in her apron, not looking. Then in March a green tip came over the stones, curled like a question mark, and it kept coming. By June it had reached the bottom step where her father used to sit mending nets. She never said a word about it. She just left the gate open.

Ruth is ninety now and still sweeps those steps before the boats go out. When the new lads come in off the water, she points at the bloom nearest the sea and tells them to look closely. There, where the stone is worn smooth, that's where his hand used to rest.