Black and grey hibiscus flowers with scrollwork and Greek script on the side of the ribs, in a realistic botanical style.

Hibiscus flowers and Greek script on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three hibiscus blooms climb diagonally up the side of the torso, joined by curling scrollwork and shaded leaves. The petals and centres are rendered with soft grey shading and fine dark linework, giving a realistic, dimensional look. Greek lettering reading Σ'αγαπώ sits below the lowest flower, and the whole piece is in black and grey ink.

Botanical Realism Ribs Hibiscus Flower Scrollwork Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting came off a Piraeus freighter in the spring the lock gates at Brentford jammed, and it reached Maud Tanner wrapped in a page of Greek newspaper. The sailor who gave it to her did not stay to explain. He pressed the stone pot into her arms, tapped the side of his nose, and said one word over his shoulder as he walked back up the towpath: sagapo.

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She set it on the cabin roof of the Wren, where the afternoon sun reached it. Through the grey months of river fog she carried it indoors each night and stood it on the stove ledge, and it sulked, dropping curled leaves onto the floorboards. The bargees moored alongside laughed at her for fussing over a weed. Maud only said that a hibiscus wanted three things: heat, patience, and somebody who would not stop talking to it. So she talked to it. She told it about the tugs that passed, the swans that fought below Kew, and the sailor who had not come back.

By June the first bloom opened, red as a shut purse, then the second, and by midsummer the third, each one pushing its stamens out at the fog like a tongue. The Wren was sold the following autumn. The new owner, a lad with a transistor radio, found the sailor's note tucked under the pot and asked what the Greek word meant.

Maud took the note back and folded it into her coat. It means you talk to it every morning, she said, and left him the pot.