Botanical tattoo of pink and yellow honeysuckle flowers with grey-green leaves on the calf.

Honeysuckle flowers on a lower leg

Botanical · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A honeysuckle sprig with two pale yellow and pink blooms, a slender stem and several grey-green leaves, shown on the outer lower leg. The petals are softly shaded with smooth gradients, while the leaves use darker grey shading for depth. The composition is small and centred, with the flowers at the top and the leaves trailing down toward the ankle.

Botanical Calf Flower Leaves Stem Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The honeysuckle came up through the fence at Calder Bridge the same summer the line was slated for closing, which Mr Pruett said was no coincidence, only the sort of thing that happens when nobody pulls the weeds. I had the job of pulling them, with a flask of tea and a pair of secateurs the railway had stopped issuing years before. Nobody else wanted the tangled end of platform two.

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Mrs Hollis came every Thursday with a carrier bag of cuttings wrapped in wet newspaper. She had been the booking clerk for thirty-one years and had never once been late for a train, though she claimed she had been late for most other things. 'Honeysuckle wants to climb something,' she said, pressing a stem against the old lamp post. 'Let it.'

By August the bine had found the signal wire and then the waiting shelter's gutter, and the blooms hung in pale yellow trumpets with their pink throats turned out, the smell thick enough to stop you on the steps. Commuters who had never looked up started looking up. A boy with a violin case asked me the name and wrote it on his hand. The timetable was cut again in September, and the last Thursday came before Mrs Hollis's cuttings had rooted in their jam jars along the ticket office sill.

On the final evening I cut one sprig, the longest, its grey-green leaves still dusty from the rails, and laid it on the seat of the last carriage before the guard raised his flag. When the train pulled out it took the scent with it, and I stood on the empty platform until the lamps came on. Somewhere up the line, I like to think, a stranger found it on the seat and carried it all the way to the city.