Black line drawing of two crossed leafy sprigs forming a V shape around a four-line italic quote, a fine line botanical tattoo design.

Crossed leafy sprigs with italic quote

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Two crossed sprigs with small pointed leaves along each stem form a V shape, meeting at a point at the base. A four-line quote in italic serif capitals sits in the open centre between the branches. The linework is fine and black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Botanical Lettering Sprig Leaves Branches Quote Script

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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 cuttings have been wrapped in wet newspaper since Barstow, and you keep checking them the way other people check a phone. Two willow whips, each as long as your forearm, bound at the base with red wool. The man at the Needles filling station called them dead wood. You told him willow forgives everything, which is what your grandmother used to say, and he shrugged and sold you a bottle of water to pour over the paper.

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The road out past the dry lake runs straight for forty miles without a bend, and the heat lifts the tarmac into silver sheets that look like water until you reach them. You stop twice to pour. Once a lorry driver pulls alongside, leans out of his cab, and asks whether you're carrying flowers to a funeral. You tell him they're for planting. He laughs as if you've said something foolish, then drives on.

By evening you reach the place Ruth described in her letter: a spring under a cracked concrete tank, a fence with a gap the width of a child, and beyond it a strip of soil darker than anything you have seen since the coast. You kneel and push the cuttings in one at a time, and the wool slips loose. Within the hour the wet tips have started to lean toward each other, as if they were always going to cross.

You sit back on your heels with the engine ticking behind you. Ruth wrote that she needed someone steady more than she needed anything green, and you had thought she was being poetic. Now you watch the two tips meet above the soil and understand that the willow was never the point. Someone who would carry water across a whole desert for a stick was the point.