Close-up of a colour tattoo of three pink flowers with green swirling vines across the lower abdomen, above the hips, below a navel piercing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink flowers and vines on the lower abdomen

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

The image shows a lower abdomen with three pink, five-petalled flowers with darker pink centres, clustered at the centre of the design. Green vines with curling tendrils extend outwards on both sides, following the line of the hips. The linework is smooth and outlined, with soft shading on the petals and a warm, slightly soft-focus photograph.

Botanical Other Flower Hibiscus Vine Swirl Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bramble hadn't rinsed the trowel since the morning shift, and Ada found it on the bench beside the cuttings, a crust of loam drying grey along the blade. "Who left this out?" she said, though she knew. Nobody on Deck Nine touched the old hibiscus tray without the seed warden's permission, and the warden was asleep for another four hours.

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The cuttings were the last of the Pembroke line, three stems grafted onto vine rootstock that Ada's grandmother had smuggled aboard in a sealed jam jar. Pink petals, five to a bloom, with dark throats as if something had struck them there. For sixty years they had survived on the ship's grey light by being fussed over in secret. Ada had learned to tie the tendrils with thread so they would curl the right way, the way the old pictures showed, when the vine ran round the hip of a woman who had once stood on a real beach.

When the warden finally woke, she came down the ladder with the ship's ledger under her arm and stopped at the bench. She didn't scold. She lifted the trowel, looked at the clean edge Ada had made, and set it down beside the tray. "Your grandmother used to talk to these," she said. "Said the vines were better listeners than the crew."

Ada pulled the stems closer to the lamp. Two buds had opened overnight, their centres catching the light like the first sparks of a fire. "Then we'll keep them listening," she said, and for the first time in weeks the air on Deck Nine smelled of something other than water.