Fine line black tattoo of three outlined tulips on slender stems with two leaves, placed on the ankle.

Three tulips on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small bouquet of three tulips on thin stems, joined at the base with two leaves, is tattooed on the outer ankle. The petals and stems are drawn in fine, single black outlines with no shading or fill, so the flowers appear open and light. The ink is black on pale skin, and the photo is taken from above with the ankle centred against a wooden floor and a denim jeans hem.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Tulip Flower Bouquet Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tulips came in on Thursday in a cardboard box that had been rained on, the paper gone soft at the corners, and Maureen Haskell stood under the awning of Ferrier's Yard and counted them out by hand. Forty bulbs in cones of wet newsprint, red and cream and a bruised purple nobody had ordered. She wrote the wrong count on the ledger and crossed it out with the pencil she kept behind her ear for exactly this.

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Her brother Dennis had the stall beside hers, selling secondhand tools that never sold. He came over with two teas in paper cups and nodded at the flowers. "Mum always bought them the week before the fair," he said. "Never the week of." She said she knew that. She had been there. Neither of them mentioned that the fair had been cancelled three winters back and nobody had thought to tell the tulips.

The rain eased by four and the market went grey and gold under the lamps. Maureen sold eleven bunches of three, each tied with garden twine, to people who asked no questions and looked pleased when she gave them the change in coins. The last customer was a girl in a denim hem, rolled once at the ankle, who wanted three stems exactly, no more, and paid in damp notes. Maureen wrapped them in a page torn from the ledger.

That night she worked out the figures again at the kitchen table. Eleven bunches, thirty-three stems, seven left in the bucket. She drew the bouquet on the back of the invoice, three open cups on thin lines, two leaves, and then, because the rain had started again, she drew it a second time.