Colour tattoo of a purple cross decorated with small blue flowers, placed centrally on a woman's upper back below her blonde hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple cross with blue flowers on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A purple cross with a shaded, ornate edge sits centrally on the upper back, with small blue five-petalled flowers climbing along its vertical arm. The linework is soft and the shading gives the cross a slightly raised look against the skin. The subject is shown from behind, with the back of the head and a magenta off-shoulder top framing the tattoo against a dark background.

Botanical Back Cross Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cross on the chapel gable had been bare grey stone when my grandmother came to Hatherleigh Fen in 1961, and by the time I was old enough to hold the ladder it had gone the colour of a bruised plum, thanks to the lime-wash her husband mixed with violet dye from the dyers' sheds at Sallow Bridge. She said the colour was for Lent. Nobody argued with her about it, because nobody argued with Ada Pyke about anything that involved a ladder.

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The flowers came from the ditches. Every April she walked the drove with a paper bag and came back with forget-me-not roots wrapped in wet newspaper, and she pressed them into the mortar along the upright beam, five petals each, the blue so pale it looked like the sky had been rinsed. My mother said they would choke the stone. My grandmother said stone that couldn't take a bit of company didn't deserve to stand up at all.

The year the chapel was condemned, a surveyor from the council came with a clipboard and a face like cold tea. He photographed the cross and asked who was responsible for the flowers. I said I was. He wrote it down, then asked whether the roots would lift the render. I told him they had been lifting it since 1961 and it was still standing.

On the last Sunday before the demolition men arrived, I climbed the ladder alone with seed I had gathered from the drove that morning. The purple had faded to lilac in the wet weather, and the blue flowers at the top had already gone to seed. I pressed the new roots in under the crossbar, where the stone was still warm from the sun, and left the rest for the wind to decide.