Fine line black botanical sprig with small budded flowers and leaves tattooed vertically on the left ribs of a torso.

Fine line botanical sprig on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A slender sprig with thin stems, small closed buds and a few leaves runs vertically down the side of the ribs. The linework is delicate and even, with light grey shading inside the buds. The skin is pale and the composition is centred, with a white fabric held at the top edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Sprig Flower Bud Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook Dunnet had the galley fire banked and the soup on, and still the sprig in the tin hadn't opened. Ellen watched it from the scullery door, counting the closed buds as if they might add up to something. Her father had cut it from the hedge behind the chapel the morning the Sweetwater sailed, wrapped the stem in wet muslin, and told her a sprig carried aboard would keep its buds shut until the ship turned for home.

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The voyage was long. Ellen learned to scrape salt from the rail, to peel potatoes in one unbroken curl, and to water the sprig from the kettle when no one was looking. The men called her Little Kettle. Mr Harrow, the bosun, swore the thing was a bad omen and asked her twice to throw it over the side, but she only shrugged and went on fetching water.

In the third week of the gale the Sweetwater lost her foremast, and the galley floor flooded to the ankle. Ellen sat on the flour barrel with the tin in her lap and felt the stems go cold. She did not pray. She talked to the sprig the way her mother talked to bread, low and steady, about the lane behind the chapel and the smell of the hedge in June.

When the sun came up over a grey coast the next morning, the first bud had split, then the rest. Ellen carried the tin up on deck and held it out to the wind. The men who had laughed at her stood quiet, looking at pale flowers that had no business blooming in salt air. Somewhere ahead a harbour bell rang, and the buds stayed open.