Two clasped hands showing matching black linework tattoos of flowers and leaves on each wrist, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral wrist tattoos on clasped hands

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two pale hands are clasped together against a dark glossy background, each wrist carrying a tattoo of a flower cluster with leaves. The flowers and leaves are drawn in black outline with light grey shading, and the two designs mirror each other. The palette is monochrome, and the tight framing keeps the tattoos at the centre of the composition.

Botanical Other Flower Leaves Hand Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Win, you will laugh, but the two young women in the back room have finally paid up, and I want to tell you how it happened. They came off the Tuesday train with one cardboard case between them and a gardening book held together with string. Mrs Hobday downstairs decided they were a music hall pair. I thought nothing of it until the second evening, when the younger one knocked at my kitchen door and asked for a basin of cold water and the vinegar I keep for the brass.

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I saw then what they had been keeping under their cuffs. Each had the same climbing flower inked on the inside of the wrist, drawn in black with grey washed into the petals so it looked pressed under glass. The leaves lifted toward the thumb on both, and when they laid their arms side by side on my scrubbed table they were mirror images, like a pair of gloves turned out. The older one said it was jasmine off their mother's back gate in Hastings, and that a man in Brighton had charged them a week's wages to make sure the lines would last.

I did not ask more. I wrapped the wrists in clean linen and told them the vinegar would take the sting out, which was a lie, but they thanked me as if I had told the truth. Next morning they paid the whole month in silver, counted out into a saucer, and asked whether the room might be kept for them every August. I said yes before I had thought it through, the way you say yes to a cat at the door.

They left on the Friday with the gardening book and a sprig of something green in the older one's buttonhole. I stripped the bed and found a single black petal pressed flat between the sheets, and I have put it in the drawer with your letters. Come in August and see for yourself. The room still smells of vinegar, and I am not sorry.

Your loving sister, Ada