Close photo of a red and orange flower tattoo with green leaves, joined to a black tribal band across the lower back, in a black and white photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red flower with tribal band on lower back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bold red and orange flower with green leaves sits on the side of the lower back, joined to a black tribal band that curves diagonally across the skin. The flower has dark outlines and solid colour fills, while the band uses black solid shapes with triangular patterning. The rest of the photo is black and white, so the colour of the tattoo stands out against the skin, and dark denim is visible at the bottom edge.

Traditional Back Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had not yet lifted from the cloister garth when Father Ambrose sent me to the gatehouse, and I found a sailor there with a parcel of wet sacking in his arms and his coat buttoned wrong. He had come up from Bristol on the carrier's cart. "It wants a warm wall," he said, "and a man who won't fuss."

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Brother Cuthbert had the south face of the infirmary, where the stones kept the heat of the bakehouse chimney. We set the cutting in a pot of grey loam, and I watched the sailor's thumb trace a line of stepped black triangles beneath his collar, the pattern he had had inked in Apia by a man who learned it from his grandfather. He said he had never once looked at it without seeing the sea.

Nothing about the plant looked promising. Its stem was grey and split, with two green leaves folded like hands at prayer. I told him so. He laughed and said that was how they all began, and that the flowers came only once the leaves had given up hoping. I did not believe him until March, when a single bloom opened on the wall, red as a cardinal's hat, its petals curled at the edges like flames.

The sailor did not stay to see it. He had signed on to a ship bound for the Cape and was gone before the bell for Lauds. Brother Cuthbert still tells visitors that the flower came from a man who never asked God for anything. I think the sailor would have liked that. I never told him it was the nearest thing to a blessing I had that year.