Heliconia along the Ribs

I moved to Ecuador for six months in my late twenties — Quito first, then down into the cloud forest near Mindo, where I was doing research on bird migration corridors. I had never seen anything grow the way things grew there. In the Netherlands everything is tended, controlled, planted in rows. In Mindo the heliconia just appeared: enormous, waxy, red and orange and impossible, jutting out of the slope above the path like something that had decided to be there. When I came home I missed it more than I’d expected — not the specific plants but the feeling of being in a place where growing things made their own rules. I’d had a small rose tattooed on my ribs years earlier, faded now, and I’d always felt it was unfinished. I found Jess through a botanist friend in Barcelona who knew her work. I sent her a photograph of the Mindo path and a photograph of the old rose and said: I want them in the same sentence. She understood immediately. She said the heliconia would give the rose something to lean against. We kept the wild rose small and simple — five petals, nothing cultivated — and let the heliconia do what it does in nature, which is take up space without apology. She followed the line of my ribs so precisely that the stem feels like it grew there. Some days I forget it’s a tattoo. I just think: yes, that is what that part of my body looks like now.

Sofie — Amsterdam, Netherlands