Botanical tattoo of a vertical sprig of red flowers and dark green leaves running down the upper back.

Red flower sprig on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A vertical sprig of small red flowers with dark green leaves runs down the centre of a person's upper back, shown from behind. The flowers have softly shaded petals and fine stems, with the largest blooms near the middle and smaller buds towards the ends. Red ink and green leaves sit against warm skin, with a cream crochet top and straps framing the design.

Botanical Back Flower Sprig Leaves Stem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flash flood had taken the cattle grid clean off the road, so Nell left the van on the gravel shoulder and walked the last half mile with a trowel in one hand and her father's tin of seed envelopes in the other. The rain had been a week ago, and already the verge was furred with green. Mallows grew in knots along the ditch, each stem crowded with blooms, the biggest flowers at the middle and little closed buds crowding the tips like they had only just decided to come up.

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She knelt and counted before she cut anything, because her father had always counted before he cut. Eleven flowers, nine buds, a pair of dark leaves gone glossy from the wet. She took the sprig between thumb and forefinger, snipped it low, and wrapped it in a sheet of the Gazette she had been using to line the van's footwell. Then she walked back past the spot where the grid had been, past the tyre marks where the water had dragged the road sideways.

That night she pressed it between the pages of the road atlas, on the spread that showed the county line and the dry lake beyond it. Her father used to say that anything growing out here had been waiting a long time for someone to notice it. She had not believed him at twelve. She was not sure she believed him now.

Three weeks later, when she opened the atlas to check the turn-off for the nursery, the leaves had gone the colour of old bottle glass. The red had bled faintly into the paper, so that the route she had driven showed a thin rust-coloured thread from the county line to the place where the road had washed away.