Colour botanical tattoo of pink gladioli with yellow throats and green stems, placed on the upper shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink gladiolus on the shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A stem of pink gladiolus flowers with several open blooms and one closed bud runs diagonally across the shoulder and upper back. The petals are shaded with soft, blended pinks and reds, with yellow throats and dark red edging, and green leaves and stems add contrast at the base. The flowers fill most of the frame against plain skin.

Botanical Shoulder Flower Bud Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose, always has been. Sit where the wind can't find you and I'll tell you about Ada Penhale and the gladioli that grew up the sea wall at Scarrow Point. Nobody plants anything there now, and that's the lesson, if you want one.

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Tom Penhale kept the light at Scarrow for thirty-one winters, and the winter Ada bought the bulbs was the worst of them. A seed man came up the lane with a sack of corms and a cart with a broken wheel, and she bought every one he had for two shillings and a jar of blackberry jam. She set them along the wall in a row, pink as the inside of a shell, and told Tom they'd flower by midsummer if the salt didn't take them.

The salt didn't take them. Each spike opened from the bottom up, one bloom a day, the throats gone yellow like a lamp turned low, and Ada counted the weeks by them. Tom would come down from the tower at dawn, grey to the eyebrows, and stop at the wall to see how many were out. In March the fog came in for nine days together, and the boats that were out in it were the ones she watched. Every bud still closed on that wall was a boat not yet home, and she would not cut one, not even for the kitchen table.

On the tenth morning the fog lifted and the last spike on the wall was still shut tight. Tom, on the rocks below with the Hartley boys, looked up and saw the whole wall had gone red with flowers, every one of them open, and he rowed for them like a man who'd been told where to aim. That's the flowers done, you see. They haven't been planted since, and the wall is only stones now.