Colourful flower tattoo with a black and grey yin yang at its centre, on the calf of a leg with a bare foot visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin yang inside a flower on a calf

Botanical · Calf · Colour · Photo

A leg with a bare foot at the top of the frame shows a round tattoo of a yin yang symbol set within a flower with rounded petals. The yin yang is shaded in black and grey, while the petals are filled with soft blue, green, yellow and pink tones that fade into the skin at the edges, and the petal outlines are drawn in dark line. The circular design sits centrally on the lower leg against a dark, softly lit background.

Botanical Calf Yin yang Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis only ever bought one flower, and he bought it at ten to six, before the milk trains had finished rattling through the junction. I sold him a single pink gerbera from the bucket beside my till because he said the others were for people going somewhere. He was a signalman for thirty-one years and talked about the line the way other men talk about a wife: the up side and the down side, the points that wanted oiling, the bend past the viaduct where the wind tried to push you into the next county.

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The spring he retired, he brought in a sketchbook. Inside were flowers drawn in biro, each petal outlined hard so it wouldn't wander, and at the heart of each one a small circle, half black, half white, the two halves curling into each other. 'Every bloom needs its balance,' he said, tapping the page. 'Up line, down line. Run only one and you end up in a siding.' It was the most he had ever said to me in six years, and he laughed so hard his tea lid came off.

On his last Friday the rain came sideways across the concourse and the departures board flickered and gave up. I found him on platform two, where the old signal box used to stand, holding a paper cup and looking at the wet rails as if somebody had handed them back to him. I walked down with an umbrella and stood beside him, and neither of us said anything while the lamplight ran across the tarmac and broke into colours.

I still have the sketchbook. The last page is a flower with an empty centre, just a clean white circle, and beneath it in his careful capitals: LEAVE THE MIDDLE FOR THE NEXT ONE. I pinned it above my till. Every morning at ten to six I put a pink gerbera in a glass beside it and wait for whoever needs one to walk in.