Colour tattoo of purple violets with green leaves and yellow centres on the top of a foot, in a botanical style with bold outlines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple violets on the top of a foot

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

Three purple violet or pansy-type flowers with yellow centres are clustered with green leaves on the top of a foot, near the toes. The petals are filled with flat purple tones and shaded in darker violet, and the leaves are outlined in dark green. The tattoo sits diagonally across the foot against a white cloth, with painted pink toenails and a ring on one toe visible.

Botanical Traditional Other Flower Pansy Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the story of Ada Rennie and the violets, and I'll not tell it twice before the tea's stewed.

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Ada kept the walled garden above Skerrin harbour when the laird was still alive to shout about it. Nothing grew up there but kale and sulks, the wind coming off the Atlantic as if it had a grudge. Then one March, after three boats went down off the Stacks, she came down the brae with her apron full of pansy roots she'd lifted from the ditch by the old chapel, purple as a bruise and twice as stubborn. Her brother Tam laughed at her. Half the village did.

She planted them along the harbour wall where the spray hit hardest. Everyone said they'd be salt-burnt by Easter. They were not. By May the wall was a line of little purple faces, each with a yellow eye in the middle, looking up at the boats coming home as if counting them. Tam said that was nonsense. He stopped saying it the winter the Mairi went out and came back with all four men aboard, because Ada had been down there at dawn cutting a bunch to lay on the slipway, and the sea had gone flat as a plate for an hour.

Nobody on Skerrin has ever proved a word of it. But when Ada died, they carried her down the brae and laid violets on the coffin, and the wall was purple right to the end of the quay. That is why, when you are crossing to the mainland and the sea goes quiet for no reason at all, you look for the yellow eyes on the stone. And then you say thank you, and you mean it.