Hand-drawn flash design of a syringe wrapped in grey banners with lyrics, with two purple flowers, in a traditional style.

Syringe with lyric banners and flowers

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A syringe runs diagonally across the sheet, wrapped by three grey banners bearing lettered text in black ink. Two purple flowers with green leaves sit behind the banners, and the syringe barrel is shaded in orange and red. The bold black outlines and flat grey tones are set against a plain cream background.

Traditional Lettering Banner Flower Lettering Lyric

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The summer the sun stopped coming over the wall, Teddy spent his Saturdays on the potting bench, copying a song lyric onto the back of a seed packet because he had nothing else to do with his hands. I was head gardener at Hallam then, and I let him keep the old glass feed syringes from the glasshouse store, the ones we used for watering lime into the clematis, because he was twelve and sulking and it kept him out of the drizzle.

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"I want it so bad," he said, not looking up, "I'd shoot the sunshine into my veins." He said it like a joke and then like a complaint, and I told him sunshine did its work better through leaves than through anyone's arm. He filled one syringe from the rain butt, pushed the plunger until water ran out the needle, and sprayed a fine arc over the purple clematis that had sulked all spring behind the north wall.

We had three weeks of grey after that. Mrs Oyelaran from the big house came down with a flask and asked what the boy was doing with the glasshouse tools, and I said he was feeding the flowers, which was true enough. Teddy kept at it every morning, dribbling rainwater and a spoonful of seaweed feed onto the roots, talking to the plant the way other boys talked to football.

In the last week of August the clematis opened all at once, two purple stars the size of saucers, and the cloud split over the wall like a dropped egg. Teddy stood in the light with the empty syringe in his hand, squinting. "Told you," he said. I didn't tell him the flowers had been ready all along, only waiting for someone to stop staring at the sky and look at them instead.