Close-up of a black and green traditional style tattoo on an upper arm, showing an engraved uterus with fallopian tubes wrapped in leaves and vines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Uterus and leafy vine on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an anatomical uterus with fallopian tubes, drawn in bold black outlines with stippled, engraved-style shading. Green leaves with fine vein detail and a dark vine wrap around the central form and fill the composition. Black ink dominates the linework and shading, with green used as the only colour on the foliage.

Botanical Traditional Upper arm Leaves Vine Anatomy

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats were still out past the Gannet Rock when Agnes Tulloch set the clay pot on the kitchen table and told her grandson to fetch the shears. He was nine and wanted to know why the pot had two curled horns on its shoulders, like a ram's or the tendrils of a bean. She said the horns were for the way things go out and find their way back in.

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On Hallin, the old women all made their pots in that bell shape, with a spout curling off each side, and every spring they buried a seed in the clay and let it climb. The vine ran into the horns and came out again through the leaves, so the pot was never empty through the dark months. When a boat failed to come home, the women took one leaf from the vine, pressed it flat, and set it on the windowsill facing the sea. Nobody could say whether it helped. Nobody ever stopped doing it.

Agnes lifted the vine out of the soil. The leaves were dry and curled at their edges, and the dark green had gone the colour of old pennies. Her grandson held the shears in both hands and asked what they did if the boats did not come back. She told him the leaves went into the sea, and the sea kept what it was given.

He cut one leaf, slowly, and laid it on the sill. Out past the Gannet Rock the cloud broke open for a moment, and a single lamp swung round the point, low in the water, with the bow pointed toward the harbour.