Botanical tattoo of a shaded purple flower with black swirling vines and dots, running from the ankle down across the top of the foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple flower and swirling vines on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A shaded purple flower sits on the outer ankle, surrounded by black curling vines, dotted accents and tapering scrollwork. The flower has soft grey and purple shading, while the vines are drawn in bold, dark lines that continue down across the top of the foot. The photo is taken at an angle against a light cream fabric printed with grey floral toile.

Botanical Ankle Flower Vine Swirl Dot Scrollwork Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bindweed had got into the lock gates again, so Nell spent the first hour of the morning on her knees at the paddles with a bread knife, cutting it back while the mist lifted off the cut. Her grandfather's barge, the Marigold, sat low in the water behind her, its brass fittings already dulled by damp. Every spring the vines came up through the timber as if they had been waiting all winter to take the boat back.

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Joe from the lock cottage came down the towpath with two mugs and a face that said he had heard something in the pub. He held one mug out and waited until she took it. The purple orchid his sister had painted on the cabin door had faded to the colour of a bruise, and he kept glancing at it as if it might start to climb. "Ted Croft's selling up," he said. "Says the Lady of the Vines is in the hold of his boat and nobody's to touch her."

Nell looked at the swirling tendrils she had spent three summers pulling from the locks and thought about her grandmother, who had sworn the flower on the cabin was a real one, grown from a cutting taken off a bank at Stoke, and who had never once let anyone prune it. "Then Ted can come and explain it to the weeds," she said.

That afternoon she found the hold open, the rope coiled and the dry sacks shoved to one side. Under them lay a tin box with a dried purple bloom pressed between two sheets of paper, and on the lid, in her grandmother's looping hand, the words: for whoever cuts the vine next. Nell laughed until Joe came running, then she carried the box up the towpath, the bread knife still tucked in her belt.