Fine line botanical tattoo of a leafy sprig with red berries and fine script running along the spine on a woman's back.

Leafy sprig and script down the spine

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A slim sprig of green leaves with red berries climbs vertically along the spine, with a thin line of handwritten script beneath it. The linework is fine and dark, and the leaves and berries are softly shaded with watercolour-like washes of green and red. The subject is centred on a pale, bare back, with a white lace top open across the shoulders.

Fine line Botanical Back Leaves Sprig Berry Script Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi had planted the rowan by the lamp-house door the spring before the gale, and every morning since she had walked out with her scissors to see what the wind had left her. This morning it had left one sprig on the wet step, three green leaves and two red berries still clinging to it, snapped clean at the stem. She pocketed it and climbed the hundred and twelve stairs to tell her husband the light had been burning wrong all night.

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Tomas had kept the lamp for thirty-one years and did not hold with things being wrong. He trimmed the wick, wiped the glass, and wrote the hours in the log in pencil, the way his father had. But he listened to her, because she had never once lied about the weather. She said the beam had swung toward the shingle bank at three, as though something out there had called its name, and the sprig in her pocket had turned its tip toward the same place like a compass needle that had made up its mind.

They went down at first light with a boathook and a lantern. Wedged in the kelp under the bank was a tin box sealed with candle wax. Inside lay a sheet folded small, written in a hand that leaned hard to the right. The words ran in a single line down the page, and Tomas copied them into his log without understanding them, letter by letter, the way one copies a hymn: keep the light a little longer, for the ones who row home cannot see the rocks.

That night he kept the lamp burning an hour past dusk, which the Board would have written up, and at a quarter to eleven a small boat came round the point with its oars muffled in rag. Mairi met it at the landing with a shawl. Afterwards she pressed the sprig between the pages of the log, where it dried to the colour of old wine, and Tomas never again wrote the hours in pencil.