Red plumeria flower with black tribal bands, swirling vines and a small cross tattooed across the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Plumeria and tribal band on the foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A red plumeria flower sits on the top of a foot, with black vine scrolls rising above it and a small black cross below. Beneath the flower, a curved band of black tribal-style shapes with hatched and solid sections sweeps diagonally across the skin. The flower is shaded in red, while the linework and banding are in black and grey, and the photo is taken straight on against a plain background.

Botanical Other Plumeria Flower Tribal Vine Cross Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas Reyes, cook of the schooner Wren, kept a jam tin on the shelf above the stove, and in it a cutting of plumeria that had no business surviving a North Sea crossing. Each morning he wet the grey stub with the last inch from the kettle. Each morning the deckhands told him to throw the thing over the side, because a galley that grows flowers, they said, is a galley that has forgotten what it is for. Reyes only shrugged and said the old woman who sold him the cutting in the harbour at Nuku Vai had promised it would keep the sea from taking the cook.

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In the third week of October the Wren ran into a squall off the Hebrides that laid her over until the stove tore loose from its bracket. Reyes was thrown against the bread bin and came round in the lee of the hatch with his mother's rosary wound through his fingers. The mate, a silent Shetlander named Gunnar Lind, had lashed the tin to a belaying pin with tarred twine so it would not rattle away. Reyes never asked him why he had bothered. Lind only said the flower had been the first thing he saw when he came down to check on the cook.

They limped into Stornoway with a split foresail and a cook who could not stand without holding the rail. Reyes spent the next fortnight on a bunk by the stove, sipping broth and watching the tin. On the morning they sailed again, a single red bloom had opened on the grey stub, pale at the edges, deep at the throat. He pressed the tin into Lind's hands and asked him to keep it on the windowsill of the mate's cabin, where the light was better and the wind could not reach it.