Colour tattoo of three pink and red watercolour-style flowers with green stems running down the side of the ribs, near the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink watercolour flowers on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

Three loose pink and red blooms with green stems are tattooed down the side of the torso, with the largest flower at the top. The petals are built from soft washes and diffused edges rather than firm outlines, with darker red accents and splashes of colour. The tattoo fills the frame against pale skin, and the navel is visible at the lower right.

Botanical Ribs Flower Bloom Stem Petal Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every spring the boats came back from the deep water with their hulls scraped pale, and every spring Maud Tallis walked down to the harbour wall with a jar of wet paint and a brush cut from the tail of a grey cat. She painted poppies on the stones where the men unloaded their catch. Nobody asked her why. The men said the sea took what it liked, and a woman could please herself with what was left.

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One March the boats did not come back on the day the wind had promised. Three of them were out past the Carr Rocks, and the fog sat on the water like wet wool. Maud went down anyway. She had nothing in her hands but the jar. She painted the blooms large, the way her mother had, letting the red bleed out into the pink so the petals seemed to lift off the stone. Where the wash ran thin she let it run. Green stems went down to the water's edge, as if the flowers were rooted in the tide.

The first boat showed its lantern at dawn, then the second. The third came in on the evening ebb with a torn sail and a boy at the tiller who swore he had steered by the red smudges on the wall. Maud never said she had painted anything but flowers. The gales took the stones back in the autumn, and the paint went with them, but the boy grew up to be harbour master and kept a clean brush in his coat pocket for the rest of his life.