Small purple tulip tattoo with a yellow-green leaf and fine line script running beside the stem, on the side of the ribs.

Purple tulip with script on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A small tulip in purple tones sits on a fine stem with a yellow-green leaf, shown in a close view of skin on the side of the body. Thin black script runs vertically alongside the stem, and the linework is delicate and precise. The colour is applied in soft, blended shades on the flower and leaf, with the composition centred on the tattoo against plain skin.

Botanical Fine line Lettering Ribs Tulip Flower Stem Leaf Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bucket, lad, and sit where I can see your face, because this is a tale I only tell once a voyage. You'll have heard of the Dutch tulip fever. Well, in the year the Gerda Maas went out of Amsterdam with a hold full of bulbs bound for Batavia, there was one bulb in a tin box that belonged to nobody on the manifest. Its owner was a cabin boy called Piet Verhoeven, eleven years old, who'd bought it with the last of his wages from a barrow man on the Damrak.

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He kept it in his shirt through three weeks of grey water. Every morning he unwrapped the oilcloth and looked for green. Nothing. I was bosun then, and I told him bulbs keep their own counsel, and a tulip opens when it is ready and not a day before. Off the Cape the swell went mad, the galley shelf gave way, and the tin went over the side. Piet went after it with a rope round his waist like a fool.

He got it back, dripping and sulking and a little bruised. That night he wrote on the tin lid in carpenter's pencil, one word running up the side the way you'd write on a mast, then another beneath it. I asked him what it meant. He said it was for his mother, who had waved from the quay at Texel and not once waved back when the ship cleared the harbour mouth. Farewell, he told me, is only the word you need when you still mean to come back.

At Batavia the tin came up with the hold, and the bulb was pale as candle wax and sprouting. Come spring it opened on the cabin table, a purple cup on a thin green stem, and Piet cried for a whole watch. I still have that tin. Don't ask me to open it.