Close-up of a teal and black botanical tattoo with stylised leaf and bud shapes and small dots, placed centrally on the chest above a sheer black bralette.

Teal botanical motif on the sternum

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A central chest tattoo of stylised leaves or buds in teal and pale blue, joined to a stem that forms a symmetrical, vertical composition. Bold black outlines and inner detailing define each shape, and single fine dots sit above and below the motif. The skin is lightly lit, and the design is shown in sharp focus against a black mesh top.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Leaf Bud Stem Dot Ornament Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin came up from the docks at Hull with its lid rusted shut, so Agnes Pell had to take it to the smithy to be prised open. Inside, wrapped in a page of a Smyrna newspaper, lay six bulbs the colour of wet slate, and a card in her brother's cramped hand that read only: Plant them in pairs, facing, or not at all. He had never once been sentimental about bulbs.

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She set them along the south wall of the glasshouse on the first dry evening of March, three facing three, the way the card had been drawn. The wind came off the drain and rattled the panes all night. By the second week the shoots had split at the top into pale blue buds, then a second pair lower down, and the stems crossed at the root like two hands folded in a lap. Agnes kept her ledger beside the potting bench, and each morning she wrote the frost in one column and the thaw in another, marking each with a small dot in ink.

The dots came out one short every day, and she could not think why until the Sunday, when the lamp was low and she saw that the stems were not reaching for the light at all. They were feeling along the flagstones toward the old sluice gate at the bottom of the garden, the way a fingertip finds the notch of a key in the dark.

She walked down with a hurricane lamp and found the gate rusted half open, the water standing silent and high behind it. She shut it, and then she went back up through the rows and wrote in the ledger, in a steady hand: one dot for the frost, one for the thaw, and nothing left to count.