Colour botanical tattoo of a white trillium flower with green leaves and a sprig of foliage across an upper arm.

Trillium and foliage on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A white trillium flower with a yellow centre sits at the middle of the design, surrounded by broad dark green leaves. A sprig of thinner grey-green foliage extends across the arm to the right. The linework is fine and the shading is soft, with the petals left mostly pale and the leaves built up in layered greens.

Botanical Realism Upper arm Flower Leaves Foliage Sprig Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had searched a dozen cars that morning and found nothing in any of them but tinned peaches and bad temper. The estate car that rolled up to bay four smelled of damp earth, and its driver, a thin man with a sunburnt neck, kept one hand flat on the dashboard as though the car might lift off without him.

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"Anything to declare?" she asked. "Only my mother's garden," he said, and passed her a biscuit tin. Under a fold of wax paper lay three pale knobbly roots wrapped in cold moss, each with a pencilled tag: wake robin, for Edie, plant before the frost. Ruth knew the flower from the field guide her father kept in the glovebox of his van, three white petals standing open like the fingers of a loose glove, three broad leaves in a ring, and a yellow heart that looked as if someone had touched it with a fingertip.

"Two thousand miles," the man said, watching her face. "Ferry, then motorway, then a lot of country roads. Edie's been asking since March. She says they only come up where the trees are old." Ruth looked at the moss, then at the form on her clipboard, which had a box for plant material and a box for nothing to declare. She had never once in eleven years ticked the second box for a biscuit tin.

She ticked it. She wrote a reference number on the lid and waved him through. In her mirror she watched the estate car pull away towards the hills, the tin riding on the passenger seat, and she thought of an old woman somewhere in the hills looking out at a bare bank, waiting for three white flowers to push up through the leaf litter.