Black ink flower with swirling vines on the hip and side of a sunlit torso, in a botanical style.

Flower and swirl tattoo on a hip

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink flower with shaded petals sits at the centre of the design, with curling vines and dotted accents extending outward across the hip and side of the torso. The linework is bold and uniform, with light grey shading inside the petals. The photograph is taken outdoors on a sandy beach, with the tattoo filling the middle of the frame.

Botanical Other Flower Swirl Vine Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vines had worked loose from the hem again by the time the fiddler reached the second tune, and Mother Anneke swore at them under her breath, because a wedding was no place for thread to decide it wanted to wander. The bride, Sela Marrow, had asked for one flower only, a five-petalled thing like the wild periwinkle behind the lifeboat house. Anneke had given her one flower and a dozen curling stems besides, because in her experience a flower never grew alone.

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Tobias Hale had come up from the harbour with salt still in his collar and no pockets to speak of, since fishermen's trousers were cut for hauling, not for carrying rings. He had lost a brother to the bar in the winter of the big gale, and the village had decided that a wedding ought to be loud enough to drown out a sea. So the fiddle played, the children ran in and out of the dunes, and the stitched vines swung off the hem of Sela's dress every time she turned.

At dusk the old women made her sit on an upturned creel and tie the loose stems to her own sleeve. Anneke said a vine tied to something living would hold a marriage fast through any weather. Sela pulled the knot tight with her teeth and laughed, and the stems trailed down to the sand behind her.

Next morning the wedding party had gone home, but the tide had come up in the night and left a line of wet sand. Someone had pressed the flower into it at the water's edge, and the curling stems ran out from it across the shore, bending the way the sea does, toward the boats.