Colour tattoo of a gorse sprig with orange flowers and dark green stems on the thigh, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gorse sprig on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A single upright gorse sprig with spiny dark green stems and several orange and yellow buds and open flowers, some at the tips of branches and some along the stem. Bold dark outlines and flat colour fills give it a clean, illustrative look, with a few shaded green areas adding depth. The sprig is centred on the skin with plenty of space around it.

Botanical Thigh Flower Bud Sprig Stem Thorn Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abigail Penhale had been told that gorse would not survive the crossing, so she packed it in the wardian case anyway, wedged between a crate of Madeiran geraniums and a jar of water the surgeon swore was fit for nothing. The case sat on the afterdeck where the spray could not reach it, and each morning she lifted the glass and checked the sprig with the same care her mother had shown the hens.

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Her brother Joseph had never liked the plant. As a boy on the Lizard he had come home bleeding from its spines and called it the devil's hedge, and she had laughed and kissed the scratch on his wrist, because the old saying held that when gorse was out of flower, kissing was out of fashion, and gorse was never entirely out of flower. Now the ship's carpenter, a silent Dane called Ross, watched her tend it and asked once, in careful English, whether she meant to plant the thing in Newfoundland. She said she meant to give Joseph something that had not been cut.

On the thirty-first day a squall laid the ship over so hard the case slid off its shelf. When she found it, the glass was cracked and two of the buds had split. Ross knelt beside her, his big hands full of wet sacking, and between them they coaxed the sprig back into its bed of loam. Its stems were bent but unbroken, and the orange of its flowers had gone a shade deeper, as if the sea were a kind of weather it could bear.

Two weeks later they raised the grey coast of Newfoundland, and she unpacked the case on the quay where the wind smelt of salt and peat. Joseph came down the gangway with his hat in his hand, looked at the little plant, and laughed the way he had at nine years old. Then he reached out and, very carefully, touched one flower.