Colour realism tattoo of a red carnation and blue morning glory flowers with green vines along the side of the ribs.

Red carnation and morning glory on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large red carnation with shaded petals sits at the top of a vine-like scroll, with two blue morning glory flowers lower down. The petals and leaves are shaded with soft gradients and fine detail, while the vines are rendered in green with darker outlines. The design runs vertically along the flank, with the flowers in the upper and lower halves of the image and plain skin and grey fabric around them.

Realism Botanical Ribs Carnation Flower Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carnation at the top of the south wall had been planted by Mother Dorrit the year the mill burned, and she told everyone it would bloom until the wall fell down. Nobody argued. It was red as a cut thumb, it smelled of cloves in the evening, and it sulked whenever the wind came off the marsh. The morning glories were different. They had come up on their own from seed the birds dropped, and they climbed the trellis below the carnation as if they had somewhere to be.

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One summer the carnation grew tired of looking down at them. 'You open at dawn and fold yourselves away before the bees are properly awake,' it said. 'You waste the best of the day sleeping. I have stood here all my life and I have never once been closed.' The morning glories said nothing. They were busy turning their blue faces to the first light, and by noon the blue ones had folded into green twists and were gone.

That autumn the marsh fever came to Little Whitcombe. Dorrit's grandson, a boy of nine, lay three nights in the cottage below the wall with his face turned to the window. On the third night the carnation was the only thing in the garden still giving off any smell, and the old woman sat beneath it with a lamp and talked to it the way you talk to someone who is listening.

In the morning the boy woke and asked why the flowers at the bottom of the wall were gone. Dorrit said they had gone to sleep early, as they always did. The carnation, which had never once in its life closed, let fall a single petal onto the sill, and the boy took it for a sign and asked for his bread. Dorrit still says the morning glories came back the next June, a little earlier each year, and that the carnation has never complained of them since.