Colour botanical tattoo of nasturtium flowers, buds and round leaves trailing over the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Nasturtium flowers and vine on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A full-colour tattoo of nasturtium blooms, a closed bud and round lobed leaves, joined by thin green vines with tendrils. The flowers have orange and yellow petals with soft red shading, and the leaves are rendered in teal and green with gentle tonal gradients. The design wraps from the top of the shoulder down the upper arm, with the flowers sitting in the lower half of the composition against bare skin.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Bud Leaf Vine Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats went out before light that autumn, and the widow Marrin's son was not among the crews who came back. She walked down to the harbour wall each morning with a jug of tea and stood by the mooring steps, where the nasturtiums her husband had planted ran wild over the stone. Orange and gold, they spilled down the wall like paint knocked from a pot, and the round leaves held the rain in silver coins.

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The harbourmaster said the sea kept what it wanted and gave back only what it could not use. Nobody believed him, but nobody argued either. One wet morning Mrs Marrin bent to free a tendril from the steps and found it had caught a rope end, and beneath the rope, a sodden tin lunchbox with her son's initials scratched into the lid. She did not weep. She tied the lunchbox to the vine with string and left it hanging there.

Through the winter the vine grew along the wall and out over the water, reaching for the moorings of boats still tied up. Men who cut it back found their nets snarled and their hooks bent, so in the end the plant was left alone. In spring the buds came green and tight, and when they opened they were the colour of the inside of a lobster pot in low sun.

The boats that came home in April came home full. The crew of the Good Intent swore the flowers had shown them where the shoals were lying, bright as lamps under the swell. Mrs Marrin still goes down with her tea. She says the sea is only a neighbour, and a neighbour who keeps your son's lunchbox owes you a bit of fish.