Colour tattoo of a black-lined vine with yellow and orange flowers and green leaves, running up the ankle and lower leg.

Yellow flower vine on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A vine of black linework carries four yellow and orange flowers with dark red centres and green middles, along with several green leaves and curled tendrils. The black outlines are bold and even, and the petals are shaded with orange and red tones. The design climbs diagonally from the ankle up the lower leg against a plain grey background.

Botanical Ankle Flower Vine Leaf Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seeds went into the biscuit tin on the third day out of Falmouth, wrapped in a twist of oilcloth, because Mrs Penhallow would not let her son sail with nothing of home aboard. "Yellow for the sun," she said, pressing the packet into his palm, "and dark at the middle for the hearth you'll be missing." Nobody on the Mary Ellen believed they would take in salt air, least of all the cook, who swore the vine would be dead before the Line.

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It was not dead. Tobias Venn, who had signed on to get away from his father's forge, propped the tin in the galley porthole and gave it a cup of his own fresh water each morning, measured with a tin spoon. Green shoots came first, then curling tendrils that found the brass rail and held on. By the time they rounded the Horn, the vine had climbed the bulkhead beside his bunk and set four flowers, gold at the petals and rust-red where the light went in.

In the worst of the gale the tin broke loose and went skating across the deck. The cook reached for it and lost his footing, and Tobias caught it on the lee rail, one hand on a stay and the other full of stems. The vine had wound itself round the rope handle so tightly it had to be cut free. The captain said nothing about it, though he took his supper that night looking at the broken tendrils on Tobias's wrist as if they were a sign of something he had been told to expect.

They made Valparaíso in April and sailed home in June. When Tobias walked up the lane to his mother's gate, the vine was in his arms in a bucket of sea-water, nearly bare. She planted it by the step without a word. By August it had climbed the wall toward the harbour, and every flower on it faced the sea.