Black and grey tattoo of a woman with curly hair and leaves, her head bowed, shown in a bold silhouette on the upper arm and shoulder.

Woman with leafy hair on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with a head bowed forward is shown from the shoulders down, her curly hair decorated with flowers and leaves. The hair is shaded with fine stippling and hatching, while the body is a solid black silhouette with leaves trailing down the side and arm. The design is entirely black and grey and sits across the upper arm and shoulder, with plenty of bare skin around it.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Woman Figure Hair Leaves Flower Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ivy came up the seaward wall the spring after the Mary Lund went down, and by midsummer it had found the iron rail of the stair and the crack under the lamp-room door that nobody had thought to caulk. My father would have pulled it out by the roots. I did not have the heart, and then I did not have the time, because Ada had started sitting in the gallery with her head bowed over her sketchbook, and the leaves were growing in her hair as fast as she could draw them.

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She drew with a fine nib and a bottle of ink she kept in the cupboard with the paraffin. Every evening she filled the margins of the log with stipple, tiny dots pressed one by one until a curl of shadow rose out of the paper. Honeysuckle and hawthorn caught in it. Sea-pinks. Once a small brown moth that she said had come to her for directions. I asked her what she was making, and she said, "Something that keeps its back to the water," and went on dotting.

On the Thursday the fog came in thick as wool. I climbed up to wind the clockwork and found the mechanism choked with stems. The leaves had crept over the glass, and the beam was a dim green smear that a skipper coming off the Farne could not have told from the rock. I took my knife to them. They grew back before I reached the foot of the stair, trailing down the gallery in a dark shawl that smelt of rain and crushed leaf.

I did not go to the boats that night. I sat with Ada in the gallery and let the ivy have its way with the glass. In the morning the fog had lifted and the rock stood black against the water. The boats came home by the north channel, one after another, every one of them. Ada still had her head down. When I looked over her shoulder, the page was full of dots, and each one, I saw, was a light.