Hand holding a lavender sprig on a forearm
Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
The tattoo shows a single outlined hand with the fingers closed around a thin stem topped by a lavender flower spike. The linework is clean, even and unshaded, with the flower buds drawn as small filled and outlined shapes. The image is black and white, with the arm filling the centre of the frame against a dark background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Her grandmother always said the lavender had to be cut before the bees woke, so Maud Tennant went out before light with the shears and her wet boots. The lane above Saltcote ran between hedges of dog rose, and the old bushes had gone woody and tall behind the chapel wall, where nobody had planted them since the war.
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The fisherman's son, Edwin Carr, had promised to be back from the herring boats by Michaelmas. He wasn't. The village said the sea had kept him, the way it kept what it liked. Maud cut one spike each morning and laid it on the windowsill of the cottage with the blue door, because a promise left unmarked goes soft in the head, her grandmother said.
In the eleventh autumn a stranger came up the lane asking after the chapel key. He had a limp and a sailor's cap, and when he reached the wall he took the spike from her hand without asking. He turned it over, smelled it, then put it back in her fingers and closed them round the stem, as if he were the one returning something.
"It's been drying on a hook in Ostend all this time," he said. "I kept meaning to bring it back." Maud didn't ask him in. She went indoors and set the spike on the sill beside the others, and the window that faced the sea stayed open all winter so the lavender could dry in the draught.
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