Close crop of a person in black tie-dye harem trousers showing a small black ink circular tattoo on the ribs and a black ink leaf-like tattoo on the forearm.

Black ink tattoos on ribs and forearm

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph is cropped from the torso to the feet of a barefoot person in black and cream tie-dye harem trousers, standing in dry grass. A small black ink tattoo with a circular outline sits on the side of the ribs, and a black ink tattoo with angular, leaf-like linework runs along the forearm near the wrist. The tattoos are in black and grey only, and the warm, muted lighting and shallow focus keep the background soft.

Ribs Forearm Circle Leaf

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose, same as my knees. Now then, you want the story of the Wennick dye-house, the one that burned in the dry summer of fifty-two? Old Ada Pryor ran it down by the mill race, and she could make indigo sing blue out of a bucket where other women got only sludge. Her trick was never the dye. It was the binding. She'd wrap a length of cotton tight with waxed thread, round stones and round the leaves she picked off the sycamores in the lane, then dip it, and what came out had rings in it like the bottom of a pond when the light goes through.

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That June the rain stopped. The river dropped to a trickle over the weir and the vats ran low, and the bank grass turned the colour of old bread. The Hollis boy came up from the farm with a bolt of cloth that had sat in his grandmother's loft since the war and asked could she bring it back. She said she could, if he fetched her the water. So he carried two buckets up from the pump every evening for a fortnight, and she bound the cloth in circles and leaves and gave it the last of the good blue.

When she unwrapped it on the drying line, the leaves had come out pale as ash against the dark, and every circle had a hard black edge, like a sun that had been staring at the ground too long. Nobody could say how it happened. Ada only smiled and folded it up. She said the cloth had kept whatever it was given, and that was more than most of us could say for the river.