Four coloured drawings of succulent rosettes on a white background, shown as a flash design for a tattoo in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four succulent rosettes in colour

Botanical · Colour · Flash

Four succulent rosettes are drawn from above in a grid on a plain white background. The top left is green with yellow-edged leaves, the top right is deep burgundy with red edges, the bottom left is pale blue with purple tips, and the bottom right is teal-green. Each plant uses soft shading and fine outlines to show the layered leaves.

Botanical Succulent Rosette Plant Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The four plants at the crossroads had been there longer than the well, so the carters left a cup of water at each one as they passed, and the plants never once complained. Sela Brand said that was why they grew so round. She kept the tea stall beside them and charged nothing for shade.

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One August a boy called Dunstan came off the Reach with a cart of salt and a dead mule, and he was in a temper about both. He wanted to know why anyone would plant rosettes in the middle of nowhere. Sela told him the green one was for the people who had gone out and come back, the red for those who had gone out and not come back, the pale blue for the night, which was the only cool part of the road, and the teal for the water, which nobody had seen in forty years.

Dunstan laughed at her. That evening he snapped a fat leaf from the blue one and wrapped it in his shirt for luck. By morning the cart had sunk to the axles in sand that had not been there the night before, and the mule was standing on the stall's step, alive and looking pleased with itself.

Sela did not scold him. She only pointed at the rosettes, where the blue one was now bare on one side and the teal one had pushed a green shoot up through the gap. The boy went back the next day with a cup of water and poured it slowly over the stone, the way you would for someone sleeping. Nobody on the Reach has been lost since, though the road has never once been called safe.