Botanical tattoo of a black vine with two red-shaded flowers and small script words, curling around the ankle and onto the top of the foot.

Vine and flowers on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A thin black vine curls from the ankle across the top of the foot, with three small leaves and two five-petalled flowers shaded in red and brown with dark centres. Two lines of black script lettering sit along the vine on the foot. The linework is bold and clean, the flowers have soft shading, and the design follows the natural curve of the foot against a blurred grey background.

Botanical Ankle Flower Vine Leaves Script

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, the lot of you, because I'm only telling this once before the lift gets mended and you all go up in it. Hollins House had nineteen floors and not one green thing on any of them, until the summer Mrs Adeyemi pushed a cutting of wild clematis into a jam jar on the fourth-floor walkway. Nobody thought it would take. Concrete doesn't give much to anything.

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It took. The vine crept along the railings and up the drainpipe, leaves no bigger than a thumbnail, and its flowers opened red at the edges and brown at the heart, like a bruise that had decided to be pretty. The council sent a man in a yellow van with a pair of shears. He cut the first stem at the bottom, and by morning it had put out two more, curling round the bike rack as if it were hunting for a foot to climb.

The man came back a fortnight later and found the vine had reached the seventh floor, where old Mr Pell had not opened his door since the winter. It had wound through his window grille and was tapping the glass each morning, tap, tap, very polite. Ruth from the fourth floor climbed up with a bag of custard creams, and she found him sitting up in his chair, listening to it.

The man in the yellow van never came back. The council calls the vine a feature now, and it has reached the nineteenth floor, and the flowers come out every June on the roof. So when you hear the tapping at your window, don't go blaming the pipes. That's the garden coming up to see who's still home.