Close photograph of a purple botanical tattoo with a large magenta flower and grey-purple flower sketches running from the shoulder down the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple flowers across shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large magenta flower with a yellow centre sits high on the shoulder, with smaller grey-purple flowers and buds trailing down the upper arm. The petals use bold colour with soft shading and fine dark outlines. The tattoo fills the right side of the frame against a dark background, and the skin of the chest is partly visible at the left edge.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Petal Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, the kettle's not finished with you yet. You asked why the Gallows Inn keeps its back door bolted in February, and I'm getting to it, so hush. The winter the pass closed at Candlemas, the snow reached the sills by the second week, and there were eleven of us in the taproom with one barrel and a cook who only knew how to make broth. Old Mrs Halloran sat by the fire knitting a grey sock that never got any longer, and she said the garden was still out there under all that white, if a body was patient enough to look.

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Her grandson Tomas went out with a spade the third morning, swearing he'd find the rhubarb. He came back an hour later with snow in his beard and a flower in his fist, a great magenta thing as wide as a saucer, with a yellow heart full of dust like the inside of a lamp. Nobody had seen a bloom in that drift in living memory. He set it on the bar, and it did not wilt. The petals were lit from beneath, purple at the tips and dark in the veins, and when the stove ticked the outer ones lifted as though someone had breathed on them.

He went back out after supper with a lantern and followed a trail of smaller grey-purple blooms going down the slope, each one closed tight as a fist, and each one sitting in the snow like a footprint. They led him to the old mill wheel, and there stood a woman in a coat stitched from pressed leaves, waiting as if she'd been expecting him all along. She asked him if he had brought the rest of the garden in with him. He said he had only brought the one. She smiled and said that would do.

The thaw came on the Thursday. The garden turned out to be rhubarb and nettles, as Tomas had said, but he still keeps the flower in a jar on the windowsill, and it has not dropped a petal in forty years. Bolt the door, mind. She likes to be asked in, and she always knows when she hasn't been.