Colour botanical tattoo of yellow flowers, buds and green leaves on a woman's shoulder and upper arm, with a dark vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yellow flowers and vine on shoulder and arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman wears a dark sleeveless top, showing a colour tattoo of yellow flowers, closed buds and green leaves on her shoulder and upper arm. The flowers and foliage are outlined with soft, even shading that gives the petals and leaves some depth. The composition follows a vine that wraps from the upper chest over the shoulder and down the arm, with the design cropped at the neck and the lower arm.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Leaves Vine Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Sister Joan,

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You will laugh at me, but the yellow jasmine has got over the north wall at last, and it has not stopped at the wall. Brother Edric found it on Tuesday feeling its way along the gutter toward the bell cote, buds shut tight as a pair of folded letters, leaves the green of old copper. He wanted it cut back before it reached the rope. I told him the abbot who planted it in the year of the flood would have wanted it climbing, and that a vine knows its own business better than we do.

We have argued about it since Compline. Brother Edric says a vine that tangles the bell rope will be the death of us all, and he is not wrong about the rope. But I went out at dusk with the shears and could not do it. The stems had gone over the lintel and down the far side of the well house, wrapping the iron hook where the bucket hangs, as if they meant to haul the whole garden up after them. The flowers open only at night in the warm weeks, which is why none of us has seen them properly for a decade, only the scent drifting through the refectory like a rumour.

So we have made a bargain. I tie the runners loose with strips of old cassock, Edric keeps the rope clear, and the two of us will watch which bud opens first. My money is on the one near the chapel door, which has been waiting since Lent with a stubbornness I recognise.

Pray for us, and for the rope.

Brother Anselm