Black and purple vine tattoo with leaves and two star motifs running across the top of a foot, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vine and star tattoo on a foot

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black scrolling vine design with leaf shapes and two outlined stars runs from the ankle across the top of a bare foot. The linework is bold and solid black, with soft purple shading behind the swirls that gives the design a glowing look. The design curls down the foot in an S-shape, with the toes visible at the bottom of the frame against a pale, textured background.

Botanical Other Vine Swirl Star Leaf Foot Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm says the abbot will have my hide if he finds the star in the margin of the Psalter, so I am writing this to you instead of finishing the vine that runs down the left side of folio nineteen. The vine is going well. It starts at the foot of the page, where the initial P sits like a fat black bird, and climbs in long S-bends until it reaches the edge of the parchment and has nowhere to go but round again.

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The leaves came from a pattern book sent up from Lindisfarne by a brother who has never seen a vine growing. I have given them the ink I was saving for the rubrics, black as a rook's wing, and I have not been able to resist shading the curls with orchil, the purple lichen the dyer in Hexham sells us at a price the cellarer weeps over. Where the purple sits behind the stroke, the black seems to lift off the skin of the calf and hover, which is exactly the effect the abbot dislikes in the saints. He says a line should be honest and sit flat.

So last night I drew two stars, one above the crook of the vine and one below it, and I outlined them in the same black so they could not be mistaken for ornament by anyone who did not look twice. Nobody will look twice. Nobody looks at margins except the mice and me.

Here is the thing I want to tell you, Ada, and then I will sand the pumice and go to vespers. When I finished, the candle had burned low and the purple had gone soft in the lamplight, and the vine seemed to glow from underneath, as though the page were warm. I thought of Father's hands on the plough and how he always said the good things in a field are the ones you cannot see until the frost lifts. I am keeping the stars.