Black and grey drawing of two hibiscus flowers, a plumeria and leaves with swirling scrollwork, a tattoo design with no placement shown.

Hibiscus and plumeria with swirls

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil-style drawing of two large hibiscus blooms and a plumeria flower, with a leaf and a cluster of curling swirls around them. The linework is dark and the petals are shaded with soft gradations and bold contrast, with some strong black accents in the scrollwork. The image is black ink and grey on a pale background, with a slight teal cast from the photograph, and the flowers fill the frame in a dense, balanced arrangement.

Botanical Hibiscus Plumeria Flower Leaf Swirl Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plumeria cutting had to be taken before the tide turned, because Ana always said a branch cut on the ebb would keep its milk and one cut on the flood would only sulk. Nell Carrow stood among her grandmother's rows with the blade in one hand and a wet sack in the other. She counted the hibiscus bushes twice, as she did every morning, because the red ones were stealing light from the yellow ones and nobody had told them to stop.

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Tomasi Vea was waiting at the gate. He had sold coconut crabs to the hotel for thirty years and had never once asked her for anything. This morning he wanted the flowers that had been tied into every wedding garland on the island, and he would not say why. Nell gave him three cuttings with the buds still shut tight and told him to stand the jar on a windowsill where the sun could not reach it.

He came back at the next turn of the tide with the jar empty and a plate of baked fish wrapped in banana leaves. The flowers had opened in the night, he said. His wife had sat up watching them go from white to gold to the colour of a ripe mango's bruise, which was how she had always known a thing was finished. He did not cry. He set the plate on her step and asked for one more cutting, for the grave.

Nell cut it at the ebb, as the rule was, and wrapped the stem in wet sacking. Behind her the hibiscus leaned over the fence and the sea drew back over the reef in long curling lines. The fish would keep, she thought, and the flowers would keep, and that was about as much as any garden could promise.