Black linework tattoo of a hand gripping a bunch of flowers and stems, in a botanical style, on the back of a person's calf.

Hand holding flower stems on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A hand grips a bunch of stems, with several open flowers and leaves rising above the fingers. The design is drawn in black outline with little shading, and the flower petals are filled with simple detail lines. It is shown in black ink only against pale skin, with the photo taken from a low angle above blue socks and light blue canvas shoes.

Botanical Calf Flower Hand Bouquet Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove, and mind the bucket. No, not that one, the one with the cracked lip. There. Now you'll want to know why your grandfather came up the lane in February with a fistful of ditch flowers, when there was nothing blooming for miles but the frost.

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He'd been out since before light, cutting through the hedge bottom of Coldharbour field, where the bindweed and the late campion hang on in the sheltered ground. His knuckles were raw from the wire. Nobody had told him the flowers only open when the sun reaches them, so he carried them inside his coat against his ribs, hoping the warmth would do the work. It didn't, not really, but he kept them there all the same.

The flowers were for Mary Ann at the far farm, who had sat up with his mother the winter she died and never once asked him to make conversation. He didn't know how to say any of that, so he held the stems out at her gate like a man handing over a summons. She took them one at a time, the way you'd lift a sleeping bird off a fence post. Then she laughed and said the only thing that ever stayed open in her kitchen was the stuff she grew herself.

So he walked home with empty fingers and a red face. Every February after that he cut the first stems and walked them over, and every February she put them in the same chipped jug on her sill. Forty-one years. The jug's still there, love. Pass me that lamp and mind the draught on your way.