Small coloured botanical tattoo of pansies and petals on the side of a person's neck, below the ear.

Pansies and petals on the side of the neck

Botanical · Neck · Colour · Photo

A cluster of pansy flowers in purple, pink and yellow, with two loose petals, sits on the side of the neck below the ear. The petals have soft, blended shading that gives a pressed-flower, watercolour look rather than hard outlines. The composition is small and diagonal, with the larger flowers near the jaw and a single petal lower down on the neck.

Botanical Neck Pansy Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed vault under Kew Ridge flooded again last spring, so the archivists moved the last pressed pansies into the cold rooms above the old greenhouse. You are the one who carries the ledger up the iron stairs each morning, past drawers labelled in a hand nobody living still owns. Tilda taught you to read the faded numbers, and to tell a viola from a heartsease by the lower petal alone.

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Today the drawer marked VIOLA TRICOLOR 2261 has a bloom missing. Someone has taken it, and the card left in its place says only: "for the boy at the lock house, he likes the yellow one." Tilda would have been furious. You are not, quite. You turn the ledger page and find a loose petal tucked behind the card, bruised purple at the tip as if it had been held too long between fingers.

You know what it means to keep something small for someone. You put the drawer back and leave the petal where it lies. On the way down the stairs you stop at the window, where the late light comes through the glass in watery violet and gold, and you think that the boy will press the flower under a heavy book and forget it for years, and that is exactly how it should go.