Black ink Kokopelli figure playing a flute beside a scrolling vine with heart motifs, tattooed on the side of a woman's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kokopelli and vine scrolls on the neck

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a Kokopelli figure playing a flute sits on the side of the neck, below and behind the ear. A line of curling vine scrolls with small heart shapes rises from the figure's flute. The ink is dark and even, and the photograph is taken from a side angle with the face out of frame.

Botanical Neck Vine Scroll Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are standing in the yard behind the village hall at Kestle Mill with a flute you bought off a man in Penzance, and the bride's mother is asking whether you can play something that isn't 'that tune from the telly'. Bindweed hangs heavy over the hedge, and the trestle tables are already sagging under seed cake and bottles of cider nobody has opened yet.

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The figure you know from your grandmother's tea towel has a hump on his back and kicks his feet up as if the ground is too hot to stand on. You were told once that he carries the seeds of every harvest in that hump, and that wherever he plays the wind follows him into the fields. You think of that as you lift the flute. You play the old count with the dropped beat, and the first pair of swallows dips low over the marquee.

The groom's uncle, who has been sitting on a crate with his tie undone, gets up and starts clapping on the off-beat. Then the bride's sister joins him, then the vicar's wife, then a boy in a borrowed blazer. By the third turn of the tune the whole yard is stamping, and the bindweed on the hedge seems to lean toward you like a crowd leaning in to hear a secret.

When it finishes, nobody asks for the telly tune again. The bride's mother presses a folded five pound note into your palm and says the wind has been kind to them all day. You walk out to the lane, pocket the note, and find a single pale seed caught in the hem of your coat. You push it into the cracked gutter by the gate and leave it there.