Black ink tattoo of the word Ohana in script with a hibiscus flower and swirling linework on a forearm, set against a mandala patterned background.

Ohana script and hibiscus on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the word Ohana in bold black script across the forearm, with a hibiscus flower to the right and dotted and swirling linework beneath and around the lettering. The petals and central stamen of the flower are outlined in solid black with some inner shading. The ink is black and grey, and the background is a warm wood-tone surface with a mandala pattern.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Ohana Script Hibiscus Flower Swirl Dot Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hibiscus came up through the cracks of the harbour wall the spring after the boats were sold, and nobody in Porthkennack could say who had planted it. Maud Tresize said it was the gulls. Her brother said it was the tide. Old Ruan Pascoe, who had kept the lighthouse until the automatic lamp came, said only that it was a flower from warmer water, and that it had come a long way to be stubborn in the wrong place.

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Maud was the one who watered it, with a tin can carried up from the fish-house pump every morning before the gulls were awake. She told nobody why. Her mother had gone to the mainland for work and not come back, and her father sailed the long-liners out of Newlyn and was gone for weeks at a time, so the wall had become a meeting place for the children who had nowhere else to be. There were six of them by August. None of them were related. They shared bread, a cracked football and the flower.

In September a storm took the southern end of the wall and the children were scattered to aunts and cousins across the county. Maud went to a farm at the top of the moor with a woman she had never met, who put a kettle on without asking her name. For a long time Maud kept her head down. Then one wet morning a letter arrived with six different handwritings on it, each one saying a version of the same thing: come back when you can, the flower is still here, we are still the ones who count.

Maud walked the moor road back to the harbour with the letter folded in her coat. The hibiscus had been trodden down by the storm and was pushing up again through the broken stone, one red bloom open towards the sea. She knelt and filled the tin from the puddle, and the others found her there before she had finished pouring.