Fine line black and grey tattoo of a single flower on a stem with dark leaves, placed on the upper back below the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small flower on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small flower with a short stem and two dark, pointed leaves is drawn on the upper back of a person with their hair tied up. The petals are outlined in fine black linework with light grey shading, and the leaves are filled with solid black ink. The design sits centrally below the neck, with plenty of open skin around it, and the image is taken straight on from behind.

Fine line Botanical Back Flower Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bloom on the north cliff opens for one week after the spring gales, and Mrs Corrie has sent you up the goat track with a trowel, a paper bag and a warning about the wind. You climb with the sea on your left, pewter and restless, and the lichen on the rocks is the same grey as the sky. Nothing down there cares who slips.

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You find it where she said, wedged in a crack of schist: one stem no taller than your hand, a single pale flower with petals thin as tissue, shaded at their edges like breath on glass. Two leaves rise beside it, dark and pointed, as if someone dipped them in ink before the wind could soften them. You kneel and do not dig. Mrs Corrie was clear. Take the seed head, never the root, because the root holds the cliff together.

The pod is dry and swollen, and it rattles when you lift it. Below, the ferry horn sounds twice, and you know the boat will leave without you, and for once you let it. You sit with your back to the rock and watch the gannets fold themselves into the water one after another, until the light goes thin and the flower is only a pale smudge against the stone.

That evening, at the post office counter, Mrs Corrie tips the seeds into an envelope and writes an address in careful capitals. You read it upside down. It is your own flat in Glasgow, the one you left in March with a single suitcase and no forwarding address. 'It won't grow where you are,' she says, pressing the flap shut with her thumb. 'That's rather the point. Plant it somewhere you have to come back to.' You take the envelope down to the pier and hold it tight until the morning boat comes round the headland.