Colour botanical tattoo of a purple iris and closed bud on thin stems, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple iris and bud on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A purple iris bloom and a closed bud sit on thin, curving green stems. The petals are shaded in violet with lighter highlights and yellow markings at their centres, and the outlines are dark and fairly fine. The design runs diagonally across the side of the torso, with a navy top strap crossing the frame beside it.

Botanical Ribs Iris Flower Bud Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hadley Coombes had checked phytosanitary certificates at the Dover freight lanes for nineteen years, and she could tell a lie from a bulb by the smell. The crate on bay seven smelled of wet peat and something sharper, like cut green stems left too long in a warm car. The driver, a boy with a Ghent accent and a clipboard that kept sliding off his knee, swore the consignment held only bearded irises bound for a garden centre in Kent.

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She lifted the lid anyway. Inside, packed in damp newspaper dated three weeks earlier, were rhizomes wrapped in cloth, and among them a single cut stem with one bud still closed tight, its purple gone almost black at the tip. A loop of green thread held it to a thin wire. Nothing on the paperwork mentioned a bud. Hadley turned it under the lamp and thought of her mother's garden in Ramsgate, the row of irises beside the washing line that flowered the week her father left, violet and ruffled at the edges. Her mother had cut every bloom that summer and given them away to the neighbours rather than watch them fade.

"It's for a funeral," the boy said quietly. "The lady's husband grew them. She wanted something from his last planting. That's the only one that came up."

Hadley looked at the bud for a long moment, then at the form on her desk. She stamped the release, wrapped the stem back in its newspaper herself, and tucked the thread so it would not snag. When the lorry pulled out past the barrier, she saw the bud through the gap in the tarpaulin, still closed, riding on the boy's knees toward the motorway.