Black botanical flower and swirl tattoo on a hip, photographed outdoors on a sunny beach.

Flower and swirl design on a hip

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black flower with a central dot and pointed petals sits on the side of the hip, surrounded by curling scrolls and small dots. The linework is bold and even, with light grey shading on some petals. The image is a close crop of skin and a pink bikini bottom on a sandy beach, with the design placed in the centre of the frame.

Botanical Other Flower Swirl Scroll Dot Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The copper came back from the printer with a hairline crack running straight through the centre of the bloom, and Ada Penrose stood over it at the bench until the lamp burned down to a blue bead. Five pointed petals, each one cut by hand with a lozenge graver. The dot at the heart she had pressed with a punch so many times her thumb ached. Mr Hollis at the nursery wanted it finished by Monday. He wanted it, he had said, to look like something a person could hold in one hand and carry home.

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She had drawn the scrolls first, the way her mother taught her, letting the tendrils run off the edge of the leaf as if they had somewhere better to be. Nobody in the trade cut scrolls that way anymore. They were tidy now, boxed in, like the catalogues themselves. Ada let them spill. She let one curl climb past the stamen and wind round nothing at all, and she did not apologise for it when Mr Hollis came down the stairs with his spectacles pushed up and his mouth already open.

He looked for a long time. Then he took the pencil from behind his ear and tapped the cracked centre. "Print it as it is," he said. "Put the crack in. Somebody will ask what it is, and I want them to ask." Ada wiped the plate with a rag soaked in turpentine, and the ink came up dark in the grooves, the petals left pale where she had rubbed the shading back with a smooth stone.

Three weeks later a letter arrived from Penzance. The writer wanted to know which seed the flower came from, whether it would grow in a sunny bed, and whether it might be cut from a drawing and planted all the same. Ada wrote back on the nursery's paper. There is no seed, she said. It is only a line that kept going past where it was asked to stop.