Black line drawing of the initials E and M joined by a plus sign, with a fine-line botanical sprig on each side, shown on a white background as a tattoo design.

E and M initials with leafy sprigs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A monogram design showing the capital letters E and M in a serif typeface, joined by a small plus sign. A delicate sprig of leaves with thin stems and small dots curves out from each side of the lettering. The design is drawn in black linework on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Lettering Initial Monogram Leaves Sprig

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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

Sit closer to the range, for the wind has got into the byre again and I'll not shout over it. You'll want to hear about Ellen Pryor and Malcolm Thwaite, because that's where the sprigs come from, and the sprigs are what started it all.

Keep reading

Every February the hedges along Coldharbour Lane were laid by whoever still had the wrists for it. Ellen could bend a hazel stem like a bow. Malcolm could not, so he brought her a bundle of ash tops tied with baler twine every Thursday and left them on her gatepost, and never once knocked. Nobody thought much of it. Then the cattle took the scour that autumn, and Malcolm was out every night with a lantern, and Ellen was up with the calves, and neither of them had the breath left for conversation.

Come the thaw, she found a biscuit tin nailed to her post. Inside was a cutting of wild rose rooted in wet moss, and a folded paper with two letters on it, an E and an M, with a little cross between them the way the parish clerk writes a marriage. She couldn't tell whether it was a proposal or a bill. She marched down the lane with the tin under her arm and found him sat on the wall, grinning like a fool.

"It's a sum," he said. "Where you stand plus where I stand. Doesn't come out to anything else." She told him it was the worst sum she had ever heard, then kissed him anyway while the milk lorry waited at the junction. The rose took. It's still on that gatepost, though the gate has been replaced four times, and every February some new man comes along to lay the hedge and wonders why the leaves on the lowest branch curl the way they do. Pass me that poker, would you. The story's done and so am I.