Small teal four leaf clover tattoo with soft shading on the upper back near the shoulder blade, with long brown hair falling beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal four leaf clover on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A small four leaf clover is tattooed on the upper back close to the shoulder blade. The leaves and stem are filled with soft, shaded teal ink, with lighter highlights on the leaf surfaces. The clover sits in the centre of a close crop of bare skin, with the woman's long brown hair framing the right side of the image.

Shoulder Clover Leaf Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clover had come aboard in a sack of Galway linen, or so Dessie swore, and by the third week out of Cork it was being passed along the foc'sle like a dare. Nobody could say who first found it. Four leaves, pressed flat between sheets of waxed paper and gone the colour of sea glass. The bosun kept it in his tobacco tin because he said damp hands would only spoil it, and every watch someone asked to see it, and he would lift the lid slowly, as if it were a relic from a church.

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I was the one who wanted it most. My mother kept a sprig of something green in a jam jar on the windowsill back in Ballyhaunis, and when the bosun's back was turned I asked Dessie what the fourth leaf was for. He said luck, obviously. The cook said it was the one that had got away from the other three. We argued it through the Bay of Biscay, and by the Azores I had decided it was a map, four small leaves pointing to four quarters of a world nobody had sailed yet.

In the middle watch off Flores the tin went over the side. I saw it go, the lid flapping open, the waxed paper turning pale in the wake before the swell took it under. I stood at the rail a long time afterwards. Nobody blamed me, though I had been the last one he let hold it.

When we raised the Hudson, the bosun came up on deck with the empty tin in his hand and showed me a scrap of paper folded inside the lid. On it, in pencil, someone had drawn four leaves, and the fourth was bigger than the others, pointing east, towards home.