Black and grey botanical tattoo of leaves on the neck, with script and rose tattoos on the shoulders and full arm sleeves on a woman wearing a dark bustier.

Leaf neck tattoo and tattooed arm sleeves

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a woman's upper torso wearing a dark strapless bustier, with the face outside the frame. Dark leaf and foliage linework sits on the neck, script lettering on the right shoulder, and the arms are covered in black and grey sleeve work including roses and a figure, with more tattoos across the fingers and hands. The shading is smooth grey wash against warm skin tones, and the composition centres on the chest with the arms framing the image.

Botanical Lettering Neck Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Hand Leaves Foliage Script Rose Figure Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cuttings arrived in a tin that had once held boiled sweets, wrapped in wet newspaper from Falmouth, and by the time Mrs Pell carried them up the glasshouse steps the leaves had gone the colour of old pennies. I took the tin from her without a word. Forty years of pressing ferns had taught me that you never tell a grower what a plant has been through; it only makes them defensive.

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The label inside was in the captain's hand, a single line of script on card: Rose slips for the widow, do not overwater. Nobody in the parish knew what he meant by it. He had sailed the Lady Marrow to the Cape and back three times, and each voyage he came home with something green he would not name, pressed flat between the pages of his letters. Mrs Pell said the roses along the quay were his doing, planted from slips he carried in a leather case, and that his boy, Tom Ansty, had chalked a man in a red coat on the boathouse wall before he went to sea too.

I potted the cutting that evening in loam from the bank behind the wall. Its roots were still white and fine as thread, and I held it to the lamp for a long time before I trusted it to stand up on its own. Nothing about the thing looked remarkable. It was only a stem with three leaves, dark and stiff, the sort of plant you would walk past on a quay without a second glance.

By March it had put out a new leaf, glossy as a bruise going yellow at the edges, and I wrote the date under the captain's words. Then, because it seemed only fair, I wrote Tom's name beneath that too, and pressed the new leaf flat between the pages of my own book.