Realistic colour tattoo of a pink magnolia flower with green leaves and a closed bud, shaded to look three-dimensional, across the top of a foot.

Pink magnolia across the top of a foot

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A pink magnolia bloom with shaded petals sits across the top of a foot, with a closed bud below it and small green leaves rising beside it. The petals use soft gradients and dark shadowing to create depth, and the linework is largely hidden within the colour. The flower fills the left and centre of the frame against a pale cream background.

Realism Botanical Other Magnolia Flower Petal Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The magnolia outside Ward 7 flowered a fortnight early, which Gwen said was the night staff's fault for talking to it. I'd come on at ten, and by two the car park lamps had turned the tree the colour of weak tea, but the bloom at the top of the branch still showed pink when I pressed my forehead to the glass.

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Mr Okonedo in bed four had asked me to open the blinds. He said he couldn't sleep without knowing the tree was still there. Nobody had told him that a magnolia drops its flowers in a single night, all at once, as if it had lost its nerve. I brought him a cup of tea with two sugars and told him about the bud that hadn't opened yet, the one tucked low under the petals like a closed fist.

At four the porter, Tomasz, came up with a box of linen and a bunch of supermarket carnations he'd bought for his mum and forgotten. We put them in a jug. I asked whether he'd seen the magnolia from the lift, and he said he'd never once looked up at it in three years. Then he went quiet and looked, and I saw him make the face people make at things they should have noticed sooner.

By six the sky over the multi-storey was grey pearl. Mr Okonedo was asleep with the blind still up. The bloom had kept its shape all night, which I hadn't expected, and the petals looked cupped, as if they were holding the last of the dark. I wrote it in the handover book: Magnolia open. Bud still closed. Tell day shift to look.