Close-up of a watercolour-style orange tulip with a black script word and stem tattooed on the inner ankle.

Orange tulip and script on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A soft orange and red tulip bloom sits above a black script word with a long, sweeping stem that runs down towards the ankle. The petals use blended, wash-like shading in orange and yellow, while the lettering and stem are in crisp black linework. The tattoo is centred on pale skin against a dark, reflective background.

Lettering Botanical Ankle Tulip Flower Script Word Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Agnes Rutter had been on her knees in the allotment since five, sacking under her and a trowel in her fist, working the black soil behind the Eldon Street terrace. Coal dust had sunk into the ground so long that nothing grew there without a fight. The bulbs had come in a brown envelope from her son in Leeds, with a note that said orange, Mam, like the lamps in the pit yard. She had never trusted a catalogue to get a colour right. She put them in anyway, twelve of them, at the end of the row where Joe used to stand his barrow.

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The shift horn carried up from Bradley at six, and the men came back down the lane in their boots with dust still in the creases of their necks. Joe had done thirty-one years on the face and come up grey every night of them. In April the first bloom split open, then the rest, one after another, until the row looked like someone had spilt a paraffin lamp across the bed and the flame had decided to stay. Neighbours leaned on the gate and said nothing, which was how the street said things.

Maureen from number nine asked for a bloom for the chapel on Sunday. Agnes said no, then went indoors and came back with a clean jam jar and cut the best one herself, wrapping its stem in the Sunday paper. Afterwards she sat on the step with a stub of chalk from the coal-shed wall and wrote a word on the flagstone where the sun would reach it first, the letters leaning and running down towards the gutter the way the stems did. When the rain came it would wash the word away, and she found she did not mind that it would have to be written again.