Black and white line drawing of a botanical design with a dahlia-like flower and a fern stem, labelled Leo with a short line of text beneath, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Leo botanical flash with dahlia and fern

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white ink drawing of a curving stem bearing serrated, fern-like leaves and a dense, spiralling flower head with a partly drawn scalloped band beside it. The linework is fine and uses hatching and stippled dots, and the composition is set on a plain white background. The word Leo in serif capitals and a three-line italic quote sit beneath the illustration.

Botanical Flower Dahlia Fern Leaves Stem Dot Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive at the Hollins Road reunion with a bruise on your wrist from the car door, and Gemma Ferrier is already at the buffet telling anyone who will stand still that she runs a yoga studio in Harrogate. You have a sentence ready about the sausage rolls being stale. You keep it behind your teeth like a boiled sweet, the way you learned to in Year Nine, when every word you said seemed to end in detention.

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Mr Pryce, who taught chemistry and once confiscated your fern-pressing kit, peers at your name badge and asks what you do now. You tell him you draw plants for a catalogue. Someone says, 'Oh, like a florist,' and the old irritation stirs. You think of the dahlia in your sketchbook, all those scalloped petals packed tight around one hard centre, and how you spent a whole winter inking them one dot at a time so nothing would show through the paper. Patience is just a method, you decided, like anything else.

Priya Nandakumar finds you by the coat rack. She still has the same laugh, the one that used to get you both sent out of Latin. 'I always thought you had the best things to say,' she says, 'and never said them.' You nearly tell her that you did say them once, to the wrong people, and that the silence afterwards cost you far more than any reply would have.

Instead you let the moment settle. Through the window the hedges are turning, the ferny edges already going brown. You count three, the way Mr Pryce taught you before a titration, because a reaction only starts if you give it the chance. 'The rolls are fine,' you say. They are, really. Your mouth stays closed around the sting, and it sits there, sweet and sour, until the taxi comes.