Black and white photograph of a woman's bare back with a fine line botanical tattoo of slender branches and seed heads spreading from the shoulder down to the waist.

Branching botanical tattoo across a woman's back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman seen from behind, her short curly hair framing the shot and one hand resting on her shoulder. Delicate branches with clusters of seed heads spread across her back and down her side, drawn in fine dark lines that taper and fork as they travel. The grey background and soft studio lighting keep the focus on the tattoo and the smooth skin beneath it.

Fine line Botanical Back Branches Twig Seed head Plant

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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 brother who taught you to graft apple wood has been dead eleven winters, and still you walk to the north wall in February to see what he left behind. You have been sent with a pair of shears and instructions from the cellarer to cut back the old umbellifers before the frost gets into their stems. The beds are the colour of wet slate. Everything has gone to seed, the heads dried to small brown cups that rattle when the wind comes off the moor.

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Brother Anselm used to say that a plant spends its summer drawing a map of where it has been. You did not believe him, but you find yourself reading the forks anyway. Every branch splits where a bud once considered going one way and decided on two instead. You cut only what is dead and leave the rest standing, because the goldfinches come down from the yew each morning to pick at the seed, and the abbot has written in the ledger that the birds are to be fed before the brothers are.

By the time the bell rings for none you have tied a bundle of stalks for the infirmary, and the rest of the wall is lined with thin dark lines that taper into nothing against the stone. In the potting shed, Anselm's old pencil still sits on the sill beside a seed packet marked in his square capitals: LEAVE SOME. You put the pencil in your pocket. Walking back across the cloister, you look once more at the branches on the wall and see that they have been drawn in one unbroken hand, the way he drew every instruction he ever gave you.