Small black outline flower with white petals, green leaves and scroll details tattooed on a toe, with pink painted toenails and a sandal strap.

Flower and scrollwork on a toe

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A small flower sits on the side of a toe, with white petals outlined in black, a red centre and green leaves at the top and bottom. Thin curling scroll lines extend from either side of the flower. The ink is mostly grey and black with touches of green and red, and the image is a close crop of the foot in a brown leather sandal against a dark grey surface.

Botanical Other Flower Leaves Scrollwork Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and push the kettle nearer the grate, because the snow has shut the valley road till Lady Day and I will not tell this one twice. Years back, when the Hollin Gate still had a working bell over the door, a carrier called Nan Pell came over the top in a February storm with a wooden box strapped to her back. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a single flower her brother had pressed between two slates in a Dales churchyard, white petals ringed in black ink, a drop of red sealing wax at its heart, and a green leaf at either end like a pair of hands holding it still. He had drawn the curling vines himself, so the story goes, because he could not bear a plain stem.

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Nan meant to deliver it to a woman in Garrowby who had once promised to marry him and then married a shepherd instead. She got as far as my settle and sat down to wait out the blizzard, and she talked. She talked about the boy's fingers that were never steady and the way he laughed at his own mistakes. By midnight she had decided the flower belonged to nobody but him, and by morning she had decided that a letter with no words was a kinder thing to carry than a flower with a name.

She went down the valley the day the thaw began, with the box empty and the oilcloth folded in her apron. Nobody ever learned what she did with the flower. But the next summer a yellow-faced woman from Garrowby came up the same track with a tin of pressed petals she had found under her own hedge, and asked the innkeeper whether anyone had ever seen a bloom like that. I said I had not. Which, as you can see, is only half of what is true.