Botanical tattoo of a leafy vine with red berries and a thin script line running down the centre of a person's back, placed along the spine.

Leafy vine with berries down the spine

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A slender vine with green, olive and brown leaves and small red berries runs vertically down the centre of the lower back, with a fine black script line tracing alongside the stem. The leaves are softly shaded with loose, painterly colour blends, while the script and stem are drawn in crisp black linework. The person is photographed from behind against a plain light background, with a white crochet top draped over the shoulders.

Botanical Back Vine Leaves Berry Branch Script Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had carried the cutting up the cliff path in a jam jar wrapped in wet newspaper, and by the time she reached the keeper's cottage the stem had already started to lean towards the light. Her brother Tom said it would never take in salt air. She pressed it into the mortar at the foot of the tower anyway, on the landward side where the spray could not reach.

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Through the autumn she tied it to the iron rungs of the stair rail with strips torn from old bedsheets. Each evening, before she lit the lamp, she wrote a line on the back of a tide table and pinned it beneath the stone where the vine climbed. The first year it gave three leaves and one red berry, sour as a crab apple. Tom laughed at the words she chose. Ada kept writing them anyway: the weather, the names of ships, a sentence her mother had used about waiting for things to be ready.

The winter the lamp failed, the vine was the only thing on the headland still green when the relief boat finally came. Tom found her kneeling in the soil at the tower's foot. He read the pinned papers one by one, and his voice caught on the last, which held only her mother's sentence in pencil, unfinished.

Ada cut a single stem, slid it into his coat pocket, and said he could take it inland, where things were easier to keep. He didn't. By spring there were berries as high up the tower as a man could reach, and a second jar on the windowsill, waiting for the next one to arrive.