Painted-style red tulips on dark grey stems and shaded leaves, tattooed on the side of a thigh.

Red tulips with grey shading on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A cluster of red tulips in various stages of bloom, from closed buds to open heads, sits on long dark stems with soft grey shadows behind them. The petals are rendered with smooth red tones and darker red shading that gives them volume, while the stems and leaves use fine black linework and grey wash. The design is arranged diagonally across the outer thigh against plain skin.

Botanical Thigh Tulip Flower Bud Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate from Lisse arrived on the Tuesday, six weeks late and smelling of wet cardboard, and Mum stood over it on the back step as if it might bite. Forty bulbs lay in brown paper, each one wrapped like a boiled sweet. 'They'll never take,' she said. 'Not out here, not with the salt.' She had said the same about the lodgers' fox terrier and the new boiler, and only the boiler had proved her wrong.

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I planted them in the window boxes on the top floor, where the sea wind came in sideways and rattled the sashes. Mr Abney in room four said tulips were for municipal parks and churchyards, and he said it every morning over his kipper. In April the first bud split, a red as wet as a cut lip, and by the end of the week there were seven heads turned towards the glass, their stems bent as if they were listening to something out past the groyne.

They opened only when the sun cleared the chapel roof, and shut again by four when the fog came up off the water. I took to sitting on the landing with my knees against the banister, timing them by the church clock, which was a daft thing to do and I did it every day. Mum caught me on the Saturday and said nothing, only set a cup of tea on the sill beside the box and stayed until the petals loosened.

When the fog came in on the last Sunday, the heads drooped, and I thought they were finished. Then I saw that the lowest bloom had kept one petal lit, pale red against the grey, like a lamp somebody had forgotten to switch off. Mr Abney saw it too. He stood in the doorway with his pipe unlit and said, quite gently for him, that it would do.