Red line drawing of an open heart outline with three five-petalled botanical flowers along a curling stem, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Heart outline with flowering vine

Botanical · Colour · Flash

The design shows an open heart drawn as a single flowing red line that tapers at the top and bottom. Three five-petalled flowers sit along a thin stem that rises from the lower edge of the heart to its right side, the largest flower nearest the top. The flat solid red fill sits on a plain white background with the composition weighted to the right.

Botanical Fine line Heart Flower Stem Vine Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Dover wanted to know why a man with a pocketful of cuttings was crossing the Channel in March. I told him they were for a widow in Calais who wanted her late husband's roses to climb the right way up. He turned the wrapped bundle over in his gloves and frowned at the labels, which were in my sister's handwriting and said only Ferry, Ferry, Ferry, as if the plants had been named after boats.

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Nothing in the bundle was illegal, but the forms wanted a species, a country of origin and a reason, and I had only the reason. My sister had spent the winter training clematis up a trellis shaped like a heart, a single cane bent by her own hands and tied off at the top where the tip curls back on itself. She said the stem should start low on the left and climb toward the right, where the biggest bloom would open first. Nobody else in the family understood why the heart had to be open at the top.

The officer let me through in the end, after he had photographed the cuttings against a grey tray and sent the picture to someone in Ashford. I stood on the quay with the bundle under my arm and the wind pushing salt into my collar. The ferry horn sounded. I opened the paper once more and found, tucked among the stems, a folded card: a heart drawn in one unbroken line, open at the top, with three small flowers climbing its right side. Underneath she had written, in capitals so I would not miss it, THE GAP IS FOR YOU TO FILL.