Black and grey tattoo along the side of a torso and hip, with a castle tower, leafy vines, a flying insect and handwritten script running down the ribs and thigh.

Castle, script and vines along ribs and hip

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the side of the torso, ribs and upper thigh, and includes a castle tower with stairs, leafy vines, a small winged insect, a teapot and a cup, with lines of script running diagonally through the design. The linework is fine and even, with light shading and some solid areas in the foliage and the tower. The image is entirely in black and grey ink against bare skin, and the design wraps around the body in a flowing composition.

Ribs Thigh Castle Tower Vine Leaves Insect Teapot Cup Script Quote

Find an artist for this

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 tea had gone cold by the time Wilhelmina Gosse reached the top of the staircase, and she blamed the stairs rather than the kettle. There were two hundred and eleven of them, spiralling up the outside of the tower in stone that the ivy had been trying to reclaim since the last Lord Ashgrove died owing money to everyone in Marrowby.

Keep reading

The landing held a teapot on a wicker tray and a single china cup, set out the way Mrs Ashgrove had liked it before the bailiffs came. Nobody had sat in the chair for years. A beetle with a glassy wing, no bigger than a thimble, had taken to drinking from the saucer, which Wilhelmina found rude and also, grudgingly, charming. She poured anyway. The insect sipped, its wing catching the light from the arrow-slit window like a shard of church glass.

Ivo at the bakery thought the whole business was a joke, and said so loudly enough that the queue could hear. Wilhelmina had spent her youth being told to stop wasting afternoons on lost causes, and she had believed them, mostly. But the beetle did not care what Marrowby thought of its tea, and the stairs did not care how long she took to climb them.

She poured a second cup, left it steaming on the rim of the top step, and went down the two hundred and eleven stairs for the last time. When she looked back from the gate, the beetle had lifted off the saucer and was circling the tower, and the ivy was already creeping across the cup.