Black line drawing of a gladiolus stem with open flowers and buds on a white background, shown as a botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gladiolus stem line drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a single gladiolus stem drawn diagonally from the lower right to the upper left, with several open blooms and closed buds along its length. The flowers and leaves are outlined in black ink with fine, even linework and minimal shading, and the petals have small internal detail lines. The drawing is set on a plain white background with no colour.

Botanical Flower Stem Bud Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Dilys,

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I didn't come to the reunion in the end, though I read the card three times and propped it on the mantelpiece behind the clock. You'll think me a coward. The truth is the allotment wanted me more. The gladioli came up all at once this year, a whole row of them standing like the old Sixth Form prefects, stiff in their green sashes, and I couldn't leave them to the slugs.

Do you remember Mr Pryce in the biology room, with the pipe he never lit? He used to say a gladiolus opens from the bottom up, so the buds at the top are the last to learn what they're going to be. He said it as if it were a lesson about us, and I thought it nonsense. Out there with the secateurs this week, I counted eleven buds on one stem, the lowest already frilled open, the top ones still shut tight as a fist.

I cut the best stem for you and wrapped it in the Gazette, meaning to post it. Then I saw the leaves, sharp as blades, and thought of the girl who fenced for the county and swore she'd cut the lot of us down to size. You were always the one who said we'd all be somebody. Perhaps we are. Mostly we are just people who knew each other at fourteen.

Post is dear and the stem wouldn't survive the journey, so I've pressed one bloom between the pages of the atlas instead. It's open at the Bristol Channel, if you want to find it. Send me the photographs from the night. I promise I'll look at every face and not only yours.

Love, Margaret