Black and grey tattoo of an onion with long, curling stalks on the upper arm, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Onion tattoo on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single onion bulb with long, thin, curling stalks is drawn in fine black linework and shaded with dense hatching and stippling. The bulb sits centrally on the upper arm and is shown in a close, slightly angled crop. The image is entirely black and grey, with a plain background and part of another small tattoo visible at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Upper arm Vegetable

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth Pennock had sold onions off the same tarpaulin pitch at Hallam Street market for thirty-one years, and she knew the difference between a bulb that would keep until Christmas and one that would turn to slime in a week. The Spanish ones came in string bags hung from the awning like bunting. The ones she grew herself on the allotment came loose in a crate, still smelling of the earth they had been pulled from.

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Her nephew Danny turned up one Saturday in January with a crate of his own and a face like wet paper. He had been offered a job at the wholesaler across town and wanted her to tell him what to do with his hands while he decided. She gave him a knife and a bag of shallots and told him to peel without crying. He cried anyway, and she laughed so hard she had to sit on the upturned box.

By noon they had sold out. Ruth counted coins into a biscuit tin while Danny swept the papery skins into the gutter. The stalks he had snapped off lay curled on the pavement like the tails of small grey animals, and she told him to leave them, because a gull would have them and a gull was welcome.

He took the job. The following spring he came back with a new piece of work, and when she asked what it was he rolled up his sleeve and showed her a single onion with its green shoots curling up like smoke. "You always said the only honest thing in a market is what's underground," he said. She told him it was a daft thing to put on skin, then asked him to hold still while she looked at it properly, and she found she could not stop smiling.