Black and grey botanical tattoo of sweet pea flowers on the upper arm, with soft shaded petals along a single long stem.

Sweet pea flowers on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of sweet pea type flowers rises along one long stem across the upper arm, with several blooms at different angles. The petals are rendered in soft, translucent grey shading with darker centres and fine dark outlines on the stems. The design is set in black ink only, with generous skin space around the composition.

Botanical Upper arm Flower Stem Petal Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Ansell kept the sweet peas on the seaward side of the wall, where the salt came over in the spring gales and nothing else would stand up. Every morning before the boats went out she cut three stems, no more, and carried them down the shingle to the slipway in a jam jar with a crack in its side.

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The fleet at Carrick Haven had lost nine boats in the year the Gannet went down, and the men who came back talked about a light off the point. Mother Ansell said the light was only the sun on the water. She had grown the peas for her husband, who liked the smell of them, and when he did not come home she kept planting them anyway, because the vines climbed where they pleased and she found she could not argue with that.

In the fourth winter a boy named Tobias Quill, fourteen and sent to crew for his uncle, asked her why the flowers came up grey when the seed packet said purple. She had no answer. That spring the blooms opened pale as breath on a cold window, and the fleet took to rowing in toward the wall whenever the fog rolled in, because the grey flowers showed through the mist like writing on glass.

On the night the Ellen Rose was overdue, Mother Ansell cut every stem she had and laid them along the slipway in a line. When the boat came round the point at dawn, its crew saw the pale blooms stretched down to the water and steered for them. Nobody ever told her it had worked. She went on cutting three stems a morning, and the jam jar stayed on the wall.