Colour botanical tattoo of green leaves and a climbing vine wrapping around a bare calf, photographed outdoors on a pavement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy vine wrapping a calf

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A slender climbing vine with green leaves and curling tendrils wraps up the back of a leg from the ankle area towards the knee. The linework is fine and dark, with soft shading on the leaves in greens, pinks and muted browns. The bare leg is photographed against a grey pavement in daylight, with a shadow falling across the right side of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Calf Vine Leaves Stem Tendril Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ivy has come through the skylight again, and Mr Pollard wants it pulled before the Saturday tea dance. You tell him it has been coming through that glass since before either of you was born, and that the hall will still be standing when the last of it is cut back. He doesn't laugh. He hands you the secateurs anyway, because you are the only one on the committee who has ever danced with the bandleader without treading on his shoes.

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Upstairs the light through the roof is green. Leaves lie across the sprung floor like someone has dropped a handful of coins, and one stem has found the brass rail of the balcony and wound three times round it, neat as a clock spring. You remember the summer Eddie Marsh first asked you to dance here, how his hand sat on your back the way a tendril finds a fence, testing, then deciding. He left for Ostend that October and never wrote, and the hall kept its dances going through the blackout, the rationing and the year the roof leaked into the cloakroom.

You cut the stem where it meets the glass and it falls, slow and loose, over the edge of the balcony. Below, the band is tuning up. You take a jam jar from your bag, fill it from the urn in the kitchen and push the cut end down among the leaves. Roots come in a fortnight if you keep the jar out of the sun. You know that much about things that climb. By Saturday there will be a new shoot feeling its way up the glass, and you will let it.