Black and grey botanical flower tattoo with leaves and vines on a woman's side ribs, photographed from behind in a grey crop top.

Flower and leaves on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is seen from behind, with a black and grey tattoo of a large flower with leaves and trailing stems on her left side above the waist. The shading is soft and layered across the petals and foliage, with fine outlines defining the leaves. The pale background and white curtains keep the focus on the tattoo, which sits against her bare skin below a cropped grey sweatshirt.

Botanical Ribs Flower Leaves Vine Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the glasshouse again, and Maud Farrier spent the first hour of light breaking ice off the passion flower with the side of her thumb. Her brother Tom had planted it the summer their father died, against the advice of every neighbour in Thornbury, who said nothing soft would survive a Gloucestershire February. It had survived three. It climbed the wires like it had something to prove, its tendrils curling round anything that stood still long enough.

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By noon the sun had thinned to a coin behind the hedges and Maud was in the lane with a bucket of mash for the ewes when the carrier's cart came up the hill without its driver. A young man sat in the back on a sack of seed potatoes, holding a leather case on his knees as though it might bolt. He said his name was Ellis Vane and that he had been paid in advance to deliver a letter to the house of Thomas Farrier, and that Thomas had been dead since October.

Maud took the envelope. It was thick and smelled of pipe smoke and wet wool. Inside was a single pressed bloom, dried to the colour of old paper, and a note in Tom's careful hand: The flower opens only when someone is watching it. Keep the glass warm till I come home.

She went back to the greenhouse and stood before the vine for a long time. Then, slowly, she pulled the shutter off the east window and let the low light fall across the leaves, and one bud at the top of the trellis, which had been shut tight since autumn, began to loosen at its edges.