Monochrome line drawing of a tattoo design with a large five-petalled flower, fern-like leaves, curling spirals and bold tribal bands in a Polynesian-inspired pattern.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian-style flower and tribal band design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a large five-petalled flower with layered leaves and fern-like fronds at its upper right, set against a curved band of bold, tribal-style bands and stripes. Smaller leafy sprigs and spiral tendrils run down the left side, and a curling scroll finishes the lower edge. It is rendered in fine brown linework with hatched and solid dark fills on a plain white background.

Botanical Flower Leaves Fern Spiral Vine Sprig Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The canoe had been hollowed from a single breadfruit trunk, and by the ninth day the water in the bailing gourd tasted of tar. Otu kept the steering paddle under one arm and watched Lael bend over the clay pot lashed amidships. Wet sailcloth was wrapped round it twice. Inside, a vine no thicker than a fishing line had come through the voyage with three leaves and one stubborn bud.

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'Leave it,' he said. 'It will drown before it opens.'

She didn't answer. Each morning she lifted the cloth, tipped a cupful of rain into the soil, and folded the cloth back with the care her mother used on the good mats. The fern fronds she had cut from the cliff above the harbour were already browning at their edges, so she tucked the greenest of them under the pot's rim to keep the sun off.

On the twelfth day the sky to the east turned the colour of old bruises and the swell came up under them in long curling walls. The prow rose, hung, and dropped. The pot slid across the boards and Lael threw herself after it, arms wrapped round the clay as the sea came over the gunwale and filled her mouth with salt. When she came up coughing the bud was still there, pushed open a finger's width, five pale petals folded tight as a fist.

They fetched up on a shingle beach at dusk, where a woman in a grey shawl was pulling a net from the shallows. She looked at the pot for a long moment, then at the flower, and laughed in a way that made Otu lower his paddle. 'That grows on the far cliff,' she said. 'Only there. My grandmother carried one away once and it never came up in our soil.' Lael set the pot down in the sand, pulled the cloth away, and waited for the morning light to reach the bloom.