Colour tattoo of a green leafy bundle with white flowers and a banner reading I found within me an invincible summer, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Leafy banner with quote on a shoulder blade

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a bundle of green leaves and small white flowers tied at the base with a stem, with a grey banner across the middle carrying the words I found within me an invincible summer in capitals. The linework is bold and dark, with shaded leaves in several greens and soft grey shading on the banner. The design is centred on the upper back, photographed at an angle with the skin tone and a pink top visible around it.

Traditional Botanical Lettering Back Leaves Flower Banner Quote Foliage Stem Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell tied the cuttings with garden twine because the proper string had gone to the mice. Elder heads, a fistful of mint and a stem of bramble still beaded with rain lay across the cabin table of the narrowboat Patience while the kettle ticked on the stove. Her brother Tomasz stood in the doorway with a dripping lock key in one hand, complaining that the flowers would shed on the bread if she carried them up the towpath like that.

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'They're for the cordial, not the loaf,' she said. 'Hold the stem still.'

He didn't. Outside, the Kennet ran high and brown after a week of storms, and the lock keeper's cottage had its shutters closed against a sky that looked as though it could not decide. Nell pulled the knot tight and turned the bundle over. On the back of an old seed packet, in their mother's looping hand, were the words she had copied out in January, when the boat was still a rumour and winter stretched on without end. Their mother had said it came from a book she was too tired to finish. Nell had never found the book, only the sentence.

They hung the bundle from the hook above the stove so the heat would dry it by morning. Tomasz stopped complaining. The white heads swayed each time the hull knocked against the bank, and the cabin filled with a faint smell of honey and cut grass, as if someone had put the summer up in jars for them to keep.