Grey and purple ivy leaves and roses tattoo running down a person's back, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Ivy leaves and roses down the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo across the upper and middle back shows shaded grey ivy leaves at the top, with purple roses and small purple splatter marks. Thin, sketchy vines and smaller leaves trail down the spine in a loose, flowing arrangement. The grey shading gives the leaves depth, while the purple provides the only colour against the bare skin.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Leaves Rose Vine Splatter Star Swirl Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the wind up here has ears and likes a story better than a sermon. You have all walked past the ivy on the north face of Scarth Gap. Grey leaves, every one, as if the stone had got into them. But the old women of Hollin Cross will tell you it was green as a bottle when Ada Penrith came over the pass with one bag and a cracked fiddle, and it was her who set the cutting at the foot of the chapel wall.

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She had no money for roses, so she bought three from a tinker at the autumn fair, their roots wrapped in wet sacking. They came up the colour of bruised plums, because nobody in those parts sold red that high. The ivy climbed the stone that first summer, over the lintel, then down again in long loose ropes toward the river. Folk said the parish would pull it out. The vicar sent a boy with shears. The boy came back with his hands full of splinters and no shears, saying the vines had gripped the blades and would not let go.

Ada kept her fiddle in the chapel loft and played for the dead on Sundays. When the bell rope rotted through, the ivy held the bell up by itself for a whole winter, and that is the sort of thing a plant does once it has decided a place is its own. Then the frost came in February with the sky split open over the Gap, and the leaves went grey in a single night, as if they had spent every scrap of their colour holding the building together.

The roses kept their purple, mind, and they still come up each June in the cracks of the wall. Ada is buried under the north side of the churchyard, which is why the ivy runs down that slope and not the other. Go on, then. Mind the third bend, where the loose stones are. And if you hear a fiddle in the wind on the way down, don't stop to look for it.