Black ink tattoo of a plumeria flower, a butterfly and a tribal-style swirling band on the lower leg, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Plumeria and butterfly on a lower leg

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a five-petalled plumeria flower with a small butterfly to the left, joined by a long curving band of tribal-style pattern and spiral curls. The linework is fine and even, with the tribal band and flower centre filled with dense dotted and hatched detail. The tattoo is entirely black ink on a warm, sepia-toned photograph, and it runs diagonally up the lower leg.

Botanical Calf Plumeria Flower Butterfly Tribal pattern Spiral Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting had gone soft at the base by the time I found it, wrapped in a rag at the back of the seed vault where nobody had thought to look since the third resupply. I carried it to the greenhouse under my coat, past the hum of the scrubbers, because Mother always said a thing that smells like that should not be left alone with the recyclers.

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The plant was a plumeria, or the label said so, in the faded hand of a botanist who had signed off on the manifest a hundred and forty years before anyone aboard was born. Five petals, she had written, and a scent that would make a grown man weep in a lift shaft. I had never smelled it. I stood at the bench with the rag open, breathing in dust and rot and something sweet underneath, and thought of the tide-lines the old navigators inked along the hull plates, curling away from the keel the way this stem curled away from its own wound.

I potted it in the grey soil from bay four and set a lamp over it on the sleep cycle, and for nine days nothing happened. On the tenth a moth-shaped maintenance drone drifted in through the vent, one the council had stopped sending out years ago, and settled on the lip of the pot as if it had been searching for something to pollinate. I did not chase it off. I sat on an upturned crate and let it work.

On the fourteenth morning there was a single white flower, pale at the throat. When I counted its petals I counted five, and I laughed out loud in the empty bay until the scrubbers seemed to hush for me. I cut the first bloom and pinned it above the hatch, where the next watch would see it and know that something on Tessaly Deep was still willing to grow.