Colour tattoo of purple wisteria blossoms with green leaves cascading across a person's shoulder and upper arm, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wisteria blossoms over shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows cascading wisteria flowers in shades of lilac, violet and purple, with green leaves and thin stems curling across the top of the shoulder. The petals are shaded with soft gradients and defined outlines, and the blossoms hang down the upper arm in a diagonal sweep. The skin is pale and the background is plain and dark, so the colours stand out clearly.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Blossom Leaves Vine Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's wet from the hose. Now sit where the light comes through the pergola, because this is a story about Mrs Pargeter's wisteria, and it doesn't like to be told in the dark.

Keep reading

Every spring that vine came down off the chapel wall like it was being poured from a jug. Lilac first, then violet, then a purple so deep the bees went quiet over it. Her husband Albert had planted it the year they married, a thin switch no thicker than a bootlace, and he swore it would take the whole wall within twenty years. Nobody believed him. By nineteen fifty-three it had taken the wall, the gutter and half the lych gate, and Albert was long dead of his lungs, so the vine got the last word.

The trouble came in June, when the blossom was at its heaviest. The vicar's boy, Dennis Hollis, climbed up to cut a sprig for his mother's altar vase and the whole trellis groaned. He came down with a torn sleeve and a face like paper, swearing the stems had hold of him, that they'd wound round his wrist as if they meant it. Mrs Pargeter only laughed and went out with her secateurs, and she cut back a yard of tangle before tea.

She sat in the dark that night with her hands folded, and the story goes that next morning every cut end had put out a fresh green leaf, bright as a new sixpence, and the blooms hung lower than ever, brushing the gate as though they were beckoning someone in. Make of that what you will. I only know the wall is still there, and so is the vine, and nobody has touched it since.