Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Stitched-look flowers across a shoulder and back
Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo
The design shows a red flower with yellow stamens, a pink rose, purple blooms, a small blue butterfly and green leaves on curling stems. Bold outlines and textured shading give the leaves and petals a knitted or embroidered look. Mostly bright colour ink is used, and the flowers are arranged along the stems across the shoulder blade and upper back.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The jumpers came off Aunt Ivy's needles in October, forty of them piled on the kitchen table above Mallow Quay, and she would not let a single one leave the cottage until the shoulders were done. She worked the flowers in afterwards with a crochet hook and a jar of wool ends, looping a red poppy over the yoke, then a pink rose with leaves like folded hands, then sprigs of purple she said were for remembering. The men called it fussiness. The women understood it was a kind of map.
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I was twelve the winter the Marigold went out in the wrong weather and did not come back up the channel. Ivy sat with her hook in her lap for three days. On the fourth she took the jumper her nephew had left on the chair, the one with the blue butterfly at the collar, and unpicked it stitch by stitch until the wool lay in a loose heap like something shed.
"It was never going to be a butterfly," she said. "He wanted a gull, and I told him gulls are greedy." Then she knitted the whole thing back up in a grey she had been saving, leaving the poppy off altogether, and hung it on the hook by the door where the wind comes in.
Some mornings I still count the flowers on that hook and find one missing, and I think that is probably how she meant it to be read.
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