Close-up of a fine line black botanical tattoo of a leafy vine with a small flower, wrapping around the inside of a person's wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy vine band on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin vine with small leaves and a tiny five-petal flower wraps around the wrist like a bracelet, with a few scattered dots filling the gaps. The linework is delicate and even, with some soft shading in the leaves. The ink is black, and the design sits centred across the wrist against a pale skin tone, with a grey wall and blue denim in the background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Vine Leaves Flower Dot Wreath Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cuttings arrived in a tobacco tin on the Tuesday, wrapped in a damp copy of the Eastern Daily Press, with a label in Walter's capitals: VINE FOR MAY. DO NOT OVERWATER. I had known Walter Pell for eleven years across the wall of his allotment and had never once heard him say the word may without a seed packet in his hand. So I took the tin home and put the stems in a jam jar on the windowsill, where the light was poor and the kitchen smelt of bleach.

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By the third week the stems had grown pale roots like threads of wet string. I pinched out the tips as he had shown me, and in the evenings I walked the lane to the churchyard with a trowel and a ball of garden twine, because Walter had asked me to plant them under the gate of the old glasshouse, where his wife Edie used to sit on an upturned crate and shell peas into a enamel bowl. She had died in February. The glasshouse had no glass left in its northern panes, and the gate hung from one hinge.

The vine came up in May, as he had promised, a thin green thread that wound itself around the gatepost, then around the iron hook, then back on itself as if it had decided the gate needed a little adornment. Small leaves opened in pairs. Between them, on a stem no thicker than a hair, a flower the size of a fingernail appeared, five pale petals with a dark heart. I counted them twice. I rang Walter's daughter, who said he had never mentioned a vine at all.

I cut one length of it, the part that had curled tightest, and carried it home in my coat pocket. I pressed it between two pages of the seed catalogue and wrote Edie's name on the back. The next morning there was dew across the windowsill in tiny scattered beads, as if something small had been counting the days.