Botanical tattoo of a purple flowering sprig with teal leaves and loose falling petals on the upper arm, in a soft watercolour style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple flowering sprig on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A slender stem rises up the outer upper arm, carrying clusters of purple flowers with soft washed edges and small dark petals drifting away from the top. Lower down, large leaves are shaded in teal and dark ink with loose, sketchy black linework. The purple and teal washes sit on pale skin against a grey top, with the design framed by the arm and shoulder.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Sprig Leaves Petal Stem Lavender

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ibbotson would not part with the cutting for nothing, so I paid her in eggs and a promise never to prune her wall again. She wrapped the woody stem in a damp page of the parish newsletter and told me lavender sulks if it is moved in July. I carried it three miles along the sea wall in my coat pocket, the stalk poking out like a wick, and the wind kept tugging at the flower heads until they shed their dark little petals onto the shingle behind me.

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My father had the boat at the end of the quay then, the Constance, forty feet of tarred oak that smelt of diesel and bait. He watched me kneel on the slipway with a trowel borrowed from the chandlers. 'You'll drown that,' he said. 'Salt gets in everything.' I told him sea lavender grew on every saltmarsh between here and the Wash, and that ours could be the same, only purple. He laughed, the way he laughed at the weather forecast.

We planted it in an old lobster pot filled with gravel and shards from the fish market window. Through the winter he went out at four and came back at dusk smelling of cod and fuel, and each evening he stopped at the pot and turned the stem a little toward the lamp at the gate. By March the leaves had come up grey and bitter with salt. He never said it was alive. He only asked, every morning, whether I had watered it.

The spring he did not come back in, the pot came with me to the cottage. I set it on the sill facing the water, and the lavender spread into the cracks of the stone, purple against the grey. The petals still blow off when the wind comes up from the harbour, drifting past the glass like small dark moths. I water it every morning. I have never once told him that it was the salt that kept it going.