Two people show matching colour tattoos of green pea pods with curling tendrils on their ribs, with small blue and red splashes of ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching pea pod tattoos on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two side views of torsos show a green pea pod with curling tendrils on each rib cage, one on the left and one on the right. The pods are shaded in greens with soft highlights, and the outlines are dark and fairly fine. Small blue and red splashes sit behind the pods, and the background shows a tiled floor and a partly visible person's legs.

Botanical Ribs Tendril Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that colander, Nell, and mind the pods on the step. The slugs have had the ones by the door, but these two are sound. Always two, you see, on the one vine behind the privy wall, and I've never known them to grow apart. Your great-grandad put the seed in the year the railway came through, and the pair of them fought over the sun like twins at a christening.

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The summer I was your age, a hailstorm flattened the whole bed in ten minutes. The gardener next door swept his beans into the bin. Ours came through with their tendrils wrapped round the same wire, so tight you couldn't have slid a hair between them. Ruth's pod was split along the seam and Clem's had a crack you could have fitted a thumbnail into, but neither one fell. The tendrils had them held, the way a vine holds on to whatever is nearest when the wind gets up.

We picked them in June, and I shelled them on this very table. Nine peas from Ruth, eight from Clem, and they rolled off the board in every direction, under the dresser, into the cat's bowl. Your gran swore she'd never eat a pea again, and she didn't, not one, though she kept the empty pods. She pressed them flat between the pages of the Bible, and I found them there after the funeral, gone the colour of old paper, with the curls still on them.

Hand me the knife now. No, the small one. Let the tendrils be. They know what they're doing, even when it looks like they've got nothing to hold.