Colour tattoo of pink and blue succulent flowers with grey leaf shading across the upper arm and shoulder.

Succulent flowers on upper arm and shoulder

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Two large succulent-style flowers in pink and blue sit on the upper arm and shoulder, with a smaller purple bloom between them. Grey shaded leaves and faint sketched stems fill the gaps and soften the edges of the design. The tattoo is shown on a bare arm against a teal top and a red car, with the image cropped below the shoulder and the face not visible.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Succulent Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at Dover wanted to see the tub before he wanted to hear my story. He tipped the lid under the fluorescent strip, peeled back the damp kitchen roll and sniffed as if the plants might confess. "Plant material," he said, in the flat voice of a man who had heard every excuse twice. I told him they were cuttings from my aunt's windowsill in Lisbon, which was true, though I left out that she had taken the first rosette from a churchyard wall and called it theft in the same breath as a blessing.

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The leaves were the colour of a winter sky, powdery blue-grey, with edges that blushed pink whenever the sun got close. Aunt Teresa used to say a succulent was only a plant until it had been told to root, and that the trick was patience and a little bit of neglect. She had taught me to pinch off a leaf cleanly, let the wound dry for three days, then press it into grit and forget about it. Everything in the tub had come from that one stubborn wall, and every piece of it was wrapped as carefully as a letter.

The officer turned a rosette over with the tip of his pen. "My mum kept these in a flat in Leeds," he said. "Never once saw them flower." I told him the purple spike only came once a year, usually when nobody was looking, and that Teresa used to cry over it like a wedding. He looked at me for a long moment, then stamped the form without another question and handed it back with the words "Keep them out of the heat."

I set the tub on the dashboard before I pulled away from the kerb, the pink edges already deepening in the light. Somewhere behind me a queue of lorries was grinding forward. I counted the rosettes like coins, one, two, three, and made a promise to the grit that the first one to root would go to Leeds.