Black and grey tribal band tattoo with a flower on a woman's shoulder and upper chest, wearing a grey top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal band and flower on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo sits across the shoulder and upper chest, made of a curved tribal band with bold solid blacks and fine striped fills. A flower with rounded petals sits at the lower end of the band, shaded in soft greys. The photograph is taken close up at a slight angle, with the subject's hair falling across the upper edge of the frame.

Shoulder Tribal Polynesian Flower Plumeria Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cutting had come all the way from Auckland in a biscuit tin, wrapped in damp newspaper, and Ruth had carried it through three customs sheds and two bad-tempered lock keepers before she let it out of her sight. Now it sat on the wheelhouse step of the Mercy Jane while the Thames slid past Richmond, grey and fast after a week of rain.

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Her uncle Tavita had drawn the pattern for her on the back of a tide table the night before he sailed. He never inked anything himself, but he knew the old island lines the way other men knew football scores, and he said a curved band like that was a wake, the water a boat leaves behind so you can tell where it has been. He had sketched the flower at the lower end, five petals rolled open like fingertips, and told her the tree grew best where nobody fussed over it.

The engine coughed below Kew Bridge and died. Ruth knelt in the bilge with a spanner in her teeth, bled the fuel line, and listened to the water knock against the hull while the tin slid an inch closer to the edge of the step. When the diesel finally caught, she laughed out loud on her own, and the sound went across the water and came back off the bank.

At Teddington she potted the cutting in a clay pot of sand from the lock garden, wedged it under a tarpaulin on the roof, and wrote the date on the rim in marker. Behind the barge the river folded itself into a long slow curve, the same curve he had drawn. Whatever grew there would have to be patient with the cold, and she would know by April whether it had taken.