Black and grey plumeria flowers with Polynesian-style tribal bands wrapping across the side of a torso, shaded in soft grey tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Plumeria flowers with tribal bands on the side

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three shaded plumeria blooms sit on a curving band of Polynesian-style tribal pattern that sweeps from the lower side of the torso up towards the ribs. The flowers are rendered with soft grey shading and smooth gradients, while the tribal bands use bold black fills with chevron and herringbone detail. The image is a close crop of skin with no colour ink, so the design reads entirely in black and grey.

Botanical Ribs Plumeria Flower Tribal Chevron Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, all of you, and keep that stick away from the fire, Moana's boy. When the sea was still young and the reef was only a rumour under the water, there was a tree on the headland that bore no flowers at all. Its leaves were the colour of old rope, and the birds would not nest in it.

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A girl named Tavita lived at the foot of that headland with her mother, who wove pandanus mats for the canoe people. Every morning Tavita climbed the path and told the tree what the tide had brought in overnight: the cracked oars, the drowned crabs, the small blue fish nobody else would talk to. The tree never answered. Then one dry season the wind turned, and a current the old people called the long rope came sliding round the point, carrying three white shells that had no business being so far from the outer reef.

Tavita watched those shells turn over and over in the shallows. She carried them up the path in her two hands, not her basket, because she did not want to lose them. At the trunk she stopped, and she tied the shells there with a twist of fibre from her mother's loom, one above the other, the way you would hang lanterns for a feast.

By the next dry moon three pale blooms had opened where the bark had been bare, and they smelled like the cool inside of a coconut. The long rope still runs round that point, and the tree still keeps its flowers low, close to the wet rock where the black tide lines are. So when you see that tree, don't pick it. Now hush, the story is finished, and the fire wants feeding.