Soft pink hibiscus flowers with fine line botanical detail and light watercolour shading, on the outer upper arm and shoulder.

Pink hibiscus sprig on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sprig of three pink hibiscus-style flowers with slender stems and green leaves runs from the upper arm up towards the shoulder. The petals use delicate fine outlines with soft, translucent pink and mauve shading, and the flower centres have deeper magenta tones. The pale background and white top keep the focus on the colourful, airy linework.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Hibiscus Flower Sprig Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Teal Kettle expected the hibiscus to last the autumn, least of all Mum, who had carried the pot aboard at Braunston in April wrapped in a tea towel like a newborn. It flowered three times that summer. Each bloom was pink as the inside of a shell and gone by evening, and every morning I lifted its slender stems to check the leaves for greenfly before I had my tea.

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By September the boat smelt of diesel and wet rope, and the flower was the only thing aboard that seemed sure of itself. Mum would sit on the back cabin step with her mug and read out the names of the locks as we passed them, Buckby, Stanley Ferry, Hatton, the way she used to read out the names of relatives at Christmas. She never said where we were going. We were always heading for somewhere further along.

On the last warm morning at Hatton, a woman from the lock cottage came down the towpath with a pair of secateurs and asked whether we'd mind if she took a cutting from the one bloom left. She had kept a hibiscus on her own sill for thirty years, she said, and it had died the winter her husband did. Mum handed her the shears without a word. I watched her snip a sprig with three buds and two leaves, then turn it over in her palm the way you check an envelope for a stamp.

We went on up the flight that afternoon. When I looked back from the top gate, her front window had a jam jar on the sill, and the sun was coming through the glass onto a single open flower.