Fine line black botanical sprig tattoo with small flowers, buds and leaves, tied with a bow at the base, on a person's left side ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical sprig with a tied base on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A slim botanical sprig with small five-petalled flowers, round buds, and narrow pointed leaves runs up a stem tied with a loose bow at the base. The linework is thin and single-needle in black ink, with no shading or colour. The sprig sits upright and slightly off-centre on the side of the ribcage, with a grey top lifted by a hand at the upper left and a brick wall behind.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Sprig Flower Leaves Bud Stem Bow Botanical

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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

The drawer in the seed vault of the Marrow Tern held forty-one cuttings of larkwort, and I checked every one of them on the ninth day of each cycle, because nobody else on the ring would admit they were still alive. The ship's mind called the job housekeeping. I called it visiting. Each stem sat in its own damp wrap of muslin, tied at the base with a loose bow of waxed thread, the way my grandmother had tied them when she was keeper before me.

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She taught me on the old pressure bench, with a magnifier clipped to her collar and her thumbs steady as clockwork. A bow, she said, was not decoration. It let the stem move when the packing shifted, so the wood would not split. Loose enough to breathe, tight enough to hold. I had tied perhaps two thousand of them before the day the ship's mind flagged the humidity curve in the vault and asked me to recommend a disposal schedule for stock that had no living descendants left to replant.

I recommended nothing. I sat at the bench until the lamps dimmed to their night setting, then lifted the freshest sprig from its wrap. Five-petalled flowers, three open and two still closed, round buds like pinched beads, leaves narrow as a paring of fingernail. I drew it in the back of the log with a fine nib, one line at a time, the stem rising off the page in a slight lean, exactly as she had shown me on paper gone soft at the corners.

When the vault was emptied in the morning, I carried that one sprig through the airlock inside my coat, held flat against my side where the ship's warmth is steadiest. Out on the ring, the greenhouse glass caught the light of a sun we will not see for another century. I counted the buds the way she taught me, one, two, three, and did not look back at the drawer.