Black and grey hibiscus flowers filling a triangular frame on the forearm, drawn with fine linework and soft shading.

Hibiscus flowers in a triangle on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three hibiscus blooms overlap inside a triangular border, with their petals, veins and stamens drawn in fine black lines. Shading is built up with greys and stippled dots in the centres of the flowers, giving them depth. The triangle is sharply cut and sits centrally on the inner forearm against a dark background.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Hibiscus Flower Petal Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, love, the kettle's only just gone off, and you'll want the rest before the night nurse comes round with her torch. Ada Penhallow kept the glasshouse at Marrow Hill for thirty-one years, and in all that time she never let a hibiscus go to seed before its blooms had been counted and written in the ledger. Three plants, three pots, set in a triangle of brass rails her father had bolted to the floor. Nobody else was allowed to touch the rails. Nobody asked why.

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The trouble came the winter the boiler failed. Frost got into the north panes, and by morning the room was as cold as a chapel. Ada wrapped the three plants in sacking and sat up with them, a lamp on the bench and a flask of tea going cold at her elbow. She drew them every hour in pencil on the backs of seed packets, every vein and every stamen, because that was the only way she knew to keep a thing from slipping out of the world. By the third night the dots she'd stippled into the centres had gone grey with damp, and she was seeing petals in the dark between the glass.

Come the thaw, the plants had not died. They had folded their blooms tight and turned them all towards the one lit window, the way sunflowers do, though hibiscus has no business doing such a thing. Ada took it as an answer and wrote it down. The ledger still has the line: three blooms, one frost, all facing the lamp.

So when folk ask me what she was doing sitting up all those nights, I tell them she was keeping the lamp lit for the plants, and the plants, in their stubborn way, kept it lit for her. That's the whole of it. Now pass me that biscuit tin, and mind the squeaky board on your way out.