Colour traditional tattoo of a message in a bottle with pink flowers, green leaves and yellow sprigs on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Message in a bottle with flowers on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a corked glass bottle containing a rolled scroll, with yellow sprigs rising from behind it and pink five-petalled flowers and green leaves arranged around its base. The bottle and scroll have bold black outlines with light shading and a speckled texture on the glass and paper. The palette is bright, with pink, purple, green, yellow and tan against the skin, and the design is centred in the frame on a curved part of the arm.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Bottle Scroll Flower Leaves Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the bottle wedged between two grey stones where the meltwater runs off Hollin Gap, its cork sealed with wax gone brittle in the cold. Your father has already gone down to the fold with the dogs, and the wind is combing the yellow sprigs of heather flat against the rock. Inside the glass the paper has rolled tight, its edges freckled with damp like the sugar on a seed cake.

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You work the cork loose with your thumbnail. The hand is your mother's, though she has been dead since the winter before last, and you would know it anywhere from the tallies she kept on the backs of the feed bills. It says only that the ewe with the torn ear has come back over the top, that there are three lambs now and not two, and that he should tell you he is sorry about the gate. You read it twice, standing in the spray, and the cold gets into your fingers before you think to put it in your coat.

You know who left it. The bottle was never meant for the valley. It was meant for whoever walked the pass in March to check the drifts, and that was always her. So you take out the pencil stub from your pocket and write on the back of the same paper that the gate is mended, that the lambs are fed, and that the ewe with the torn ear can stay where she likes. You roll it tight, push it in, and press the cork down with the heel of your hand.

You set the bottle back between the stones, angled so the water cannot reach it, and climb the path toward the tarn where the pink flowers grow out of the rock. Halfway up you stop and look back. The glass catches the light once, then the cloud comes down over the gap and there is nothing to see.