Colour botanical tattoo of violas, green vines and roots with a bumblebee, across a person's shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Violas, vine and bee across a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows purple and yellow viola flowers and buds on a green vine with heart-shaped leaves, with a bumblebee in the upper right. Black linework forms exposed roots that trail down towards the lower part of the design. Flowers and leaves use soft colour shading, while the bee is shaded in yellow and black and the roots are drawn in dark ink against bare skin.

Botanical Shoulder Back Pansy Flower Vine Leaf Root Bee

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways over the Saturday market since seven, and you have stopped pretending the trays of bedding violas will sell. You tip the last of them out of their punnets onto the tarpaulin, purple faces turned up to the grey, and count roots under your thumbnail the way your uncle taught you. Along the row, stallholders are folding their gazebos in on themselves like wet umbrellas.

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A bumblebee comes in under the canvas, bumping against the plastic as if it has also lost its bearings. It settles on the lip of a clay pot where you have been keeping the old cutting, the one with ropey white roots that came out of a drawer in the house on Mill Lane when you cleared it. Nobody in the row wanted the pot. Nobody wanted the cutting. You kept it because the leaves were still heart-shaped and stubborn, and because your uncle swore violas would root in anything wet enough.

You tip the pot. The roots have pushed through the drainage hole and wound round the tray beneath, black and hairline, holding the soil in a net the shape of the stall itself. You sit on an upturned crate and work them loose one by one with a bent kitchen fork, while the bee climbs out onto the rim and waits, unbothered, as if it has been paid to supervise.

By the time the rain thins you have a dozen small plants wrapped in newspaper and one pot with the old roots trailing over the edge. You carry it home under your coat, past the shuttered bakery and the bus shelter, and set it on the windowsill. In the morning there is a new leaf, and beside it on the glass, the bee, drying its wings in the thin light.