Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Iris tattoo on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey iris flower is tattooed on the upper shoulder, with its petals and bearded centre drawn in fine outlines and soft shading. The skin is lit evenly against a plain pale wall, and a blue checked shirt is slipped off the shoulder at the edge of the frame. The face and head are cropped out of the shot, so the composition centres on the tattoo.

Botanical Shoulder Iris Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The iris came up in the mud below Stoke lock the same week the ice went off the cut, and Dad said it was the only thing on the water that ever kept its word. He had a flat-bottomed barge called the Patience Ann and a habit of talking to plants as if they were crew. I hauled the mooring lines and told him the flowers were just weeds with ambitions.

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He pushed the rhizomes in with the heel of his boot every April, a fat knot of them wrapped in sacking, always at the same bend where the willows trailed their fingers in the water. 'Somebody has to mark the place,' he said. I asked who would see them. He shrugged, the way he did when a lock keeper gave him trouble.

The winter he sold the Patience Ann to a couple from Leeds who wanted a holiday, I walked the towpath to that bend on my own. The falls were the colour of wet slate, each one folded through with a bruise of violet, and the beard on the lower petal was furred with gold, as if a bee had been working it too long. I dug up one clump with a kitchen spoon, wound it in the old sacking from the cabin, and carried it home on the bus.

The bus smelled of diesel and somebody's chips. I set the bundle on the sill of my flat above the launderette and wrote on a bit of card in his square capitals: BEND BY THE WILLOWS. By June a single bloom had pushed up out of the pot, and I stood at the window with a cup going cold, watching the warm air from the dryers lift the petals one at a time.