Colourful neo-traditional style tattoo of pink plumeria flowers, teal swirling vines and palm trees against a sunset, running down the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tropical flowers and palms along the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The design shows large pink and orange plumeria flowers at the lower edge, with teal scrolling vines and green leaves rising up the side of the body. Palm trees and a purple and orange sunset sit in the upper section, with a bright wave-like shape running through the centre. The bold black outlines, saturated colour and soft gradient shading give the piece a vivid, layered look across the curve of the torso.

Neo-trad Botanical Ribs Plumeria Flower Palm tree Sunset Vine Swirl Leaf Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cardboard box had been taped so many times it was more tape than box, and the man holding it kept glancing at the x-ray screen as if it might change its mind. Plant health at Dover is mostly sealed bags of basil and the odd confiscated orchid, so I knew before I opened it that this was going to swallow my whole lunch break.

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Inside, wrapped in a bath towel and a page of a local paper, were three plumeria cuttings, grey stems like knuckles, each with a small green tip. He said he had bought them from a woman at a market in Lanzarote who had grown them from a stick her grandmother carried over on a boat. He told it like a confession. I explained the rules, the paperwork, the fact that a stick from the Canaries needed a certificate that did not exist, and he nodded at every line, then asked whether the tips would still be alive when they reached his allotment in Folkestone.

I should have said no. Instead I held one up to the strip light and saw, under the grey bark, the faint orange of the bloom it would someday make, the colour of a sunset over water. I thought of my father doing the same thing with a fig cutting in a back garden thirty years ago, and I found myself writing a temporary holding note instead of a seizure.

He left with the box under one arm and the look of a man who had got away with something he had not quite earned. The towel stayed on my desk. Tomorrow I would send everything for incineration and sign my name to it. Tonight, in the staff car park, I noticed the stems had already split their skins, pale green at the nodes, and I drove home very carefully with the window down, as if they might still need the sea air.