Back tattoo of a sketched black-line doll with button eyes, beside watercolour pink and purple orchids and a red butterfly, covering the upper and mid back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketched doll and watercolour orchids on a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a loosely sketched black-line doll with button eyes and seams, with its head near the right shoulder. Soft watercolour-style washes of pink, red and purple orchids and a red butterfly sit beside and across the figure, with the colour fading into the skin at the edges. The composition runs diagonally from the upper right shoulder down to the lower left of the back, with the line work left open and the colour blooms scattered across the skin.

Botanical Back Doll Button Orchid Flower Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour has got into the seams of the doll again, so when you lift it off the proving shelf a fine white dust drifts past the button eyes and settles on the bench. Nobody at Pell and Sons owns it. It was already here in September, propped against the bread bin with its cloth arms tucked behind its back, as if it had been waiting for a shift to start.

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Four o'clock is the hour the building belongs to the dough. The mixer grumbles through the wall, the ovens tick as they heat, and the yard window goes from black to the colour of a bruised plum. You dust the doll down and check the stitching, and find one shoulder has come loose, with a sprig of dried lavender pushed into the stuffing. Twelve years of early starts, and you have never once seen anybody touch it.

Mrs Okonedo, who trained you, used to say a bakery keeps a small ghost for luck, and that you feed it by leaving the heel of the first tin loaf on the sill. So you tear the crust off, set it beside the doll, and a red admiral comes knocking at the glass, wings flashing like a spilt pot of paint. It settles on the crust as if it has been invited to tea.

By six the shop smells of scorched sugar and sourdough. You sit the doll back on its shelf, face to the room, buttons catching the lamp. When the first customer rattles the door and laughs at the little cloth thing with its round eyes, you think, not for the first time, that luck is mostly somebody turning up early and bringing the flour.