Black and grey hibiscus flower with a Polynesian-style tribal band wrapping from the ankle across the top of the foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hibiscus and tribal band on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey hibiscus flower with shaded petals and stamen sits on the outer ankle and top of the foot, joined to a bold tribal band of triangular and dotted patterns. A curling spiral scroll extends from the flower toward the ankle bone. The photograph shows the tattoo against a dark background with soft, even lighting.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tamsin, the tide took the lower jetty again on Tuesday, so the mail boat has put in on the north side, and I am writing this on the back of a chart of Eloa Reach that the Harbour Office has declared obsolete. They say the reef has moved. I say the reef has simply grown tired of being inked in.

Keep reading

Ruan Kesk, the palace gardener, sent up a cutting from the terraces of Mauve Hall last week, wrapped in wet sailcloth and a note saying the king keeps these red hibiscus under glass to prove he can. Each bloom lasts a single day. Ruan insists the flower is a promise that the sea will come back in the morning, and that the curl beside it is the fern which unrolled in the courtyard the night the old queen died, turning inward like a question nobody wants to answer. I have pressed the cutting between two pages of the tide tables. It has already gone the colour of weak tea.

Yesterday I walked the boundary of the kingdom with a measuring cord, as instructed, from the lighthouse to the drowned chapel. The band of triangles and dots that marks the shoal line on our charts is not a border at all, Tamsin. It is a row of stepping stones, and the dots are where the surveyors stood before they gave up. I counted them three times and got three different numbers. The cord ran out just as I reached the spot where the hibiscus would sit on the map, and a gull landed on my pencil.

So I have stopped trying to fix the coastline. I am drawing it in soft pencil now, so the sea can rub out whatever it likes. The kingdom, I have decided, is exactly as large as the morning it takes a hibiscus to fold its petals shut. Come and see it before it does.

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