Back view of a woman on a beach with a small white hibiscus tattoo on her shoulder and a black armband tattoo on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hibiscus and armband tattoos on a back and shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits on sand with her back to the camera, wearing a red and navy floral swimsuit, and holds a yellow hibiscus flower. A small white hibiscus is inked on her shoulder, and a thin black band with a decorative pattern wraps part of her upper arm. The tattoos are simple and small, with black and white ink, set against warm skin, turquoise water and pale sand.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Hibiscus Flower Armband Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tobias Wren had been told the cutting would not survive the crossing, and he had carried it anyway, wrapped in wet cloth inside a tin that once held boiled sweets. Now the tin sat on the sill of the drowned greenhouse at Lowestoft, and the sea had come up to the third step of the old promenade. Mira Okonedo, who ran the salt-pans on the new shore, watched him fuss over it the way she watched gulls fight over a dropped crust.

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"It's a flower," she said. "There are a hundred on the wall."

"There are a hundred that look like that. This one is the last of its line." He turned the tin so the single white bloom faced the thin light through the cracked glass. The petals had gone the colour of old paper, but the centre still held a faint red, like a coal under ash.

On the nail by the door hung a black cloth band her grandmother had stitched with tide-marks, one row for every flood the family had outlived. Her grandmother had said it was a map of the year the water came. Nobody could read it any more except as a pattern, and Mira had long since stopped trying.

They planted the cutting that evening in a bucket of brackish water on the roof, where the sun could reach it. In the morning there was a green tongue pushing up through the grit, and Tobias sat down on the tiles and cried like a boy, and Mira pretended not to see, and wrote the date on the tin lid in charcoal.