Colour tattoo of beetroot, carrots and potatoes with green leaves and a hand reaching in, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Root vegetables and a reaching hand on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cluster of root vegetables, including a yellow and orange beetroot, a purple beetroot, carrots and potatoes, surrounded by leaves. A realistic hand reaches into the centre from the right. Bold dark outlines and fine hatched lines define the vegetables, with saturated colour and soft shading across the forms.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Vegetable Leaves Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The inspector at Harwick Lane had already lifted the lid of the crate before I reached the front of the queue, and I could tell from the set of her shoulders that this would take a while. Inside, under a fringe of dark green leaves, sat three beetroot the size of fists, one gold, one violet, one nearly tangerine, and a scatter of carrots still muddy at the crowns. My aunt Nkechi had grown them on a strip of allotment behind the railway since March, and she had packed them for her sister in Lille as though they were jewellery.

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"Seeds or sets?" the inspector asked. "Roots," said my aunt, and reached past her to lift out the gold beetroot, turning it so the light caught the rings in its skin. She wasn't being rude. She was showing it off the way you'd show a child a bird. The inspector's hand hovered, then went into the crate too, and for a moment the two of them stood with their fingers among the leaves, arguing gently about whether a potato counts as a root.

I had expected a fine, or at least a stamp and a sigh. What I got was a lecture on the difference between a tuber and a root, delivered with a kind of hunger, and a story about her own grandfather, who kept a plot in Lagos and wrote every harvest in a school exercise book. By the time the form was signed, she had taken a carrot for herself and put a potato back, rubbing the soil off with her thumb.

Out past the barrier, my aunt tucked the crate onto the back seat and said, "Now you know why we don't send them by post." I still don't know whether she meant the vegetables or the inspector. The beetroot bled a little purple onto the upholstery, and she never once wiped it off.