Photograph of a botanical ivy tattoo in green ink with grey vine lines, running across a bare shoulder and down the upper arm, with a beach behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green ivy tattoo across a shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A cluster of green ivy leaves and thin curling grey tendrils spreads from the top of the shoulder across the upper back and down the outer upper arm. The leaves are shaded in several greens with soft highlights, while the vines are drawn in fine dark grey linework. The subject sits on a sunlit beach, with the blurred sea and sand softening the background and keeping the tattoo as the focus.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Back Leaves Vine Tendril Shoulder Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the high road for nine days when Maud Tarrant first saw the green creeping up the north wall of the Coldharbour inn. Everything else for miles was white or grey or black with frost, but the ivy kept its leaves through the winter the way it always had, glossy and stubborn, and its tendrils had found the gap under the loft shutter.

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Her husband's grandfather had planted the cutting, brought down from the far side of the pass in a wet sack, to hide the damp that crept through the stone. Carters said you could find the Coldharbour from a mile off by its green wall in January. Travellers who saw it knew there would be a fire lit and a bed aired, so they came up through the drifts and knocked, and the ivy kept watch over them.

On the ninth night a boy knocked whose hands were blue to the wrist. Maud sat him by the hearth and rubbed his fingers, and while she worked the ivy tapped at the shutter as if it wanted in. Tam, her husband, reached for the shears. "It lets the cold in," he said. Maud said nothing. She had heard the old carters say the ivy only climbs what it means to keep.

In the morning the shutter stood open and the boy was gone, though his small boot prints led only to the foot of the wall. The ivy was pressed flat against the glass with its leaves turned toward the road. Tam never touched the shears again. Maud left a lamp in that window every night after, and the green kept climbing.