Close photo of a dark blue botanical vine with leaves and scrolls across the back of a hand, wrist and onto the middle finger, with dark nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy vine design across back of hand

Botanical · Hand · Colour · Photo

A hand is shown with a dark blue-black floral vine running from the wrist across the back of the hand and onto the middle finger, with scrolling stems and pointed leaves. The linework is bold and solid with no shading, and the ink appears uniform in a single dark blue tone. The hand is photographed on a light tiled floor with a gold watch and bracelet at the wrist, and the composition is angled from above.

Botanical Hand Vine Leaves Floral Scrollwork Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye-woman of Calder Quay would not sell her indigo to anyone who came asking in daylight, so Tamsin went down the slipway at the bottom of the tide with an empty jug and a story about her brother's nets. The vats stood under the arch where the harbour wall met the rock, and the air there tasted of iron and crushed leaves. Mother Ness did not look up from her stirring. She said the blue came from a plant that grew only on the north side of the wall, where the spray never quite dried, and that it would take a whole season of climbing to strip enough of it.

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Tamsin climbed. She went up the wall with her palms torn and her skirt knotted between her knees, cutting stems of the dark-leaved vine that had crept over the stones from a cargo of seed no one remembered landing. Each stem bled a colour that was nearly black until the light caught it, and then it was the deep blue of a mussel shell turned in the hand. She carried the cuttings down in a sack and laid them in the vat without a word, the way Ness had shown her.

When the cloth came out of the dye it had leaves on it in the shape of the vine, pale where the stems had lain against the weave, and Ness said that was the price. Whatever you bind to the wall, she said, the wall keeps. Tamsin took the first length of cloth and tied it around her wrist before she left, and walked the long way home along the quay, where the vine ran in a line from the harbour to the chapel steps, green at the top and blue-black where it had been cut, and never once did she look back to see who had started it.