Black and grey botanical tattoo of two magnolia flowers with leaves on a person's shoulder and upper arm, shown in black and white.

Magnolia blooms on a shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two large magnolia-style flowers with open petals, buds and broad leaves wrap from the shoulder down the upper arm. The linework is fine and dark, with soft grey shading in the petals and leaves that gives them depth and volume. The image is a black and white photograph of the shoulder, with a grey top and the back of the neck visible.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Upper arm Magnolia Flower Leaves Bud Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The innkeeper's wife had lost three teeth to the cold and still she kept the lamp lit on the north stair, because the carter from Hollin Ford had said he would come through before the thaw if the pass allowed it. The pass did not allow it. Snow lay to the sills of the upper windows, and the inn's one cow had stopped lowing in the second week.

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On the ninth night a girl knocked at the kitchen door with a sack over her shoulder and a branch wrapped in oilcloth. She said her name was Ottilie Brand and that she had walked down from the high orchards, where an old man had planted a tree for a woman who lived across the sea. The woman had sent him a seed in a letter, and he had set it in clay that never froze. Ottilie unwrapped the cloth. On the broken branch hung two white blooms, each as wide as a palm, their petals thick and cream at the rims, and beside them a bud still shut tight.

The innkeeper's wife put the branch in a jug by the hearth. The room filled with a smell like lemon peel and wet bark. The carter's son, who had been sulking by the fire since the roads closed, got up and stood close to it without speaking. By morning the petals had dropped one by one onto the flagstones, and where they fell the snow had melted in neat round patches.

Ottilie was gone when they woke. In her place lay the empty sack, and inside it a single closed bud and a note in a hand like crushed silk: keep this out of the frost and it will open when the road does. They kept it on the sill. In April the bud split, and the carter came up the valley road with his cart and his son, and the first thing he saw was the white flower through the window.