Red watercolour-style flower with a yellow-green leaf and the word sister in fine script on the inner forearm.

Red watercolour flower with the word sister on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A red, watercolour-style flower with soft shading and a few darker accents sits on the forearm, with a thin yellow-green leaf curving beneath it. The word sister is written in delicate black fine-line script that trails from the stem toward the wrist. The image is a close, slightly angled photo with colour dominating against pale skin and a dark background.

Botanical Fine line Lettering Forearm Flower Leaf Script Sister

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Scarrow the wind came in off the Atlantic hard enough to lay the gorse flat, and the only colour that stood up to it was the red bloom that grew in the lee of the chapel wall. Old women called it the sister flower. Nobody could say why, only that it came up in pairs, one bud a little behind the other, and that if you pulled one, the second would die before the week was out.

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Elspeth Gunn was the elder, and at nineteen she took the ferry to Oban with a tin trunk and a promise to send for Ruth once she had a room with a window. Ruth stayed with the goats and the peat cuttings. Each spring she knelt in the wet ditch below the chapel, dug out the thin green shoots that crept between the stones, and wrapped them in sacking so they would not dry before the next boat.

The letters came less often than the boat. Ruth read each one aloud to the goats until she knew it by heart, then folded the paper into a narrow shape like a leaf and tucked it under a stone at the foot of the wall. By the third winter the stones were thick with paper, and the flower came up early, red as a cut, a fortnight before the ferry bell was due.

On the morning the bell rang, Ruth was already on the pier. Elspeth stepped off with her hair cut short like a city woman's, and she looked up the chapel road before she looked at her sister. Ruth said nothing. She held out the last folded leaf, its edges soft from the damp, and Elspeth opened it and found her own handwriting, never sent, asking to be let home.