Green shamrock and black vine tattoo with curling swirls running down the side of the ribs.

Shamrock vine with swirls on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large shamrock sits at the centre of a black vine that curls upwards and downwards along the side of the ribs, with smaller green clovers and leaves branching off the swirls. The black linework is bold and smooth, and the leaves and clovers are filled with green ink with some darker green shading. The composition is a tall, S-shaped vine that follows the curve of the torso against a plain skin background.

Botanical Ribs Shamrock Clover Vine Swirl Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boundary dispute had run through three generations of Corrigans before Nessa Corrigan was sent up the hill with a chain, a compass and a boy to hold the far end. The map the landlord's agent carried showed a straight wall running north to south across the bog meadow, and on paper it was clean. On the ground there was a stream that bent back on itself in a long S, turning twice before it reached the old oak, and at the bend a spring so cold the cattle would drink from nowhere else.

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She walked the bend three times with the chain. Each time the boy called out the numbers and each time they came to the same answer: the wall was a lie told by a man who had never had his boots wet. The clerk had drawn the line in ink, but the spring was in the ground, and the ground did not move for ink. Nessa sat on a stone beside the water and took out her pencil. Around the spring, where the grass was greenest, three clover heads had pushed up through the moss, and the stream had carved a curl beside them that looked like a fern unrolling.

She drew it as it was: the stream as a black line rising and falling in its S, the swirls where the water doubled back, the clover at the heart of the bend, and small leaves branching off like the ones on her grandmother's hedges. The boy asked what she was doing and she told him it was the true boundary. He laughed until she showed him the clover, and then he went quiet and held the chain the right way up.

The agent rejected the drawing in March. He said a surveyor could not map a river with flourishes. Nessa sent it to the county court anyway, pinned to the chain readings and the boy's signature. Judges, she had heard, were partial to things that refused to be straight. By midsummer the wall appeared on no map at all, and the spring still ran cold beneath the clover.