Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a geometric glass terrarium with succulents, ferns and aloe on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric terrarium with succulents on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A faceted, geometric terrarium drawn in bold black outline contains succulents, a fern-like sprig, tall aloe-style leaves and a small green plant. Its base holds layered soil in brown and orange, green hills and scattered pebbles. Solid colour in greens, teal, red-tipped pink and earthy tones sits within the heavy black linework.

Neo-trad Botanical Geometric Thigh Succulent Fern Plant Leaves Glass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glass came to the workshop in a crate that smelled of wet straw, and Mr Hollis told you to measure twice because these panes were the last of the chapel offcuts. You had spent three winters learning to score a line straight enough that the glass would part on command. Now he wanted a case with no straight sides at all, five facets pitched like a cut stone, and he wanted it finished by Saturday.

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The order came from Mrs Ashdown at the end of Chapel Row, who kept a tin of soil under the stairs and a windowsill of things that refused to die. She wanted everything in the case: the blue-green rosette that had grown out of a cracked teapot, the fern she had carried home from the moor, and the spiky aloe her husband had given her the spring before the war ended. You bedded them in sand and red grit from the canal bank, raised little hills of moss, and set three grey pebbles at the front like sheep grazing.

The black leading was the hardest part. You poured the lead came tight along every edge, then sat with your palms flat on the bench until it cooled, because one breath of draught would crack the joints. On Friday the wind came off the mill and the solder held, and you carried the thing up Chapel Row wrapped in the evening paper, holding it level the way Mr Hollis had taught you to carry a full pint.

Mrs Ashdown turned it slowly in the light from her door and said nothing for so long you thought you had broken it. Then she tapped the glass where the aloe leaned against the wall and said Arthur used to claim plants would outlive the lot of us. She set it on the sill with the pebbles facing out, and when you turned to go she was already shifting the teapot to make room for the fern.