Black and grey botanical tattoo of two magnolia blooms and a bud on the upper arm, with dotwork shading on the leaves.

Magnolia flowers on the upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large botanical design shows two open magnolia flowers, a closed bud and several leaves. The petals are drawn with clean outlines and fine internal vein lines, while the leaves carry stippled dotwork shading. A second, smaller tattoo of berries and foliage sits at the top left of the frame. The image is a close, well-lit photo of the arm in black ink and grey tones.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Magnolia Flower Bud Leaf Berry Branch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The man in lane four had a shoebox on the passenger seat and the stubborn look of someone who had rehearsed his lie on the motorway. Pruitt had the box on his knees before I'd finished asking for his passport, one hand flat on the lid as if it might wander off. Inside, wrapped in damp newspaper from Hattiesburg, was a magnolia bud no longer than my thumb, its petals folded tight as a fist. His mother had planted the tree the year he was born. She was in a hospice in Hull and had asked for one bloom before the spring. I had a form for plant material and a rule that said no.

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Rules at a port are mostly about what can be seen. I took the box to the inspection bench under the strip light and unwrapped the bud with blunt tweezers. The sepals were leathery and grey-green, the colour a tree goes on a cold morning, and when I tilted it to the light I could see the first pale edge of a petal pushing through, like someone knocking very softly on a door. I had seventeen years of seizing oranges, orchids and once a cactus hidden in a sock. I knew what the regulation said about live material from outside the Union. I also knew it would be dead by Thursday in a hot lorry.

I wrote the seizure notice, then tore it up and wrote a different one: one stem, retained for destruction, collected by the holder. Then I filled a plastic tumbler from the cold tap, stood the bud in it, and told Pruitt he could collect it from the back room once the paperwork cleared. He didn't ask what that meant. He just nodded and drove off toward the city with his empty box on the seat.

When I came in the next morning the bud had opened in the night, the way they do when nobody is watching. Two white petals lay curled on the bench like the edges of an envelope, and the whole back room smelled of lemon peel and wet wood. I logged the stem as destroyed. I kept the tumbler on the windowsill for a week, until the petals went brown at the rims and I finally let them go.