Fine line colour tattoo of two lavender sprigs with green stems and leaves on the ankle and lower leg.

Lavender sprigs on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A fine line tattoo of two lavender sprigs rises up the side of the lower leg towards the ankle. The purple flower spikes are shaded with soft, slightly textured strokes, while the thin stems and small green leaves are drawn with delicate single lines. The sprigs are set against plain pale skin, with a dark fabric sleeve and brown surface in the background.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Lavender Flower Sprig Plant Stem Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wall is still warm when you lean your back against it, and the lavender at its foot is already nodding in the afternoon heat. Your uncle's mule has wandered off again towards the chapel, where the roof fell in over the winter and the abbey stones were sold to the farms. You cut two sprigs with the bread knife, because the shears went missing from the tack room with the rest of the things nobody has paid for since Michaelmas.

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Along the curtain wall the old castle keeps its own counsel: a loop of broken stair, a window with no glass, swallows arguing under the lintel. The lavender grew here before the wall did, your mother used to say, planted by a monk who wanted something to lay on the pillows of the sick. Nobody else remembers the monk. They remember the smell, which gets into your hair and your coat and follows you all the way down to the village.

The steward's son came up the path on Thursday with a letter sealed in green wax and asked whether the castle still had a lord. You told him no, only the flowers, the stones, and whoever was foolish enough to climb them. He laughed and left the letter on the step anyway, pinned under a flat stone against the wind.

At dusk you carry the two sprigs to the gap in the wall where the light comes through. You tie them with a length of thread and hang them from the iron nail where the abbey bell used to be, and the stems turn slowly in the draught, the purple heads catching the last of the sun. Tomorrow you will open the letter. Tonight the castle has its own answer, and it smells of lavender.