Coloured flash design of a thorny vine with shark heads in place of flowers, drawn in a traditional style with bold black linework, shown on a cream background with no body placement.

Shark-headed flowers on a thorned vine

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A vertical design of a green thorned vine with several open-mouthed shark heads growing from it like flowers, each surrounded by olive-green leaves. The shark heads are shaded with fine stippled and hatched black linework, with red eyes on some of them. The vine winds diagonally from top to bottom on a plain cream background, with the strongest colour in the greens and the greys kept to the sharks.

Traditional Shark Vine Thorn Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had tended the walled garden at Saint Brannoc's for thirty-one winters and knew every bed by its smell. The new vine came up along the south wall in March, grown from a cutting a fisherman's widow left at the gate in a bucket of seawater, with no name tied to it and no word about what it was.

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By June it had flowered. Each bloom was a grey snout with rows of small white teeth, wrapped in olive leaves, and the thorns along the stems were as fine as the hooks on a handline. Prior Edwin wanted the whole thing dug out before the novices saw it. Anselm said the flowers shut at night and opened on the turn of the tide, which was true, and that they had not yet bitten anyone, which was also true, though he had watched a sparrow go into one at dusk and not come out.

The widow came back in August and asked whether the vine had taken. Anselm cut the top bloom for her with his shears, and it gaped at his glove before it shut. She tucked it into her coat and said her husband had been the same, that the sea gives back what it takes in whatever shape it likes, and that she only wanted to know it had somewhere to go.

That night Anselm went out with the lamp. The red-eyed bloom by the wall had turned its snout towards the gate, and the thorns had pulled loose from the brick, reaching for the latch. He shot the bolt, went to bed, and left the rest of the garden to the tide.