Fine line black botanical tattoo of two mirrored sprigs with flowers, buds and leaves, placed on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line botanical sprigs on chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two mirrored sprigs of flowers, buds and leaves, with one curving upward on each side of a central gap. The linework is thin and even, with small open blossoms, rounded leaves and a few berry-like buds. The design is in black ink only, set against smooth skin at the top of a dark neckline.

Fine line Botanical Chest Flower Leaves Sprig Bud Berry Foliage

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

In the fishing village of Skerrow, the women planted rue and sea holly beside their doors, and when a boat went out past the headland they cut two sprigs from the same bush. One went to the man leaving and one stayed in the ground at home, so that whatever happened at sea, the two would still be growing toward each other.

Keep reading

Mairi Lennox had done this for thirty years, and when her son Callum signed on to the whaler Ardent, bound for the southern ice, she cut his sprig and tied it with red thread. He asked where her own was. She pointed at the bush by the gate and said it was already growing, and that it would keep growing as long as she kept it.

The ship was gone eleven months. Each morning Mairi walked down to the gate and found the bush had put out new shoots on either side of the old stalk, curving upward toward the sea. She counted them every day. The neighbours said it meant nothing, that rue grows where it likes. By midsummer the two sides of the bush had reached so far apart that they framed the gap in the wall like a pair of arms held open.

The Ardent came back in the spring with eleven men, not twelve. Callum came up the lane with his sprig still green inside his coat, and he stopped at the gate beside his mother. Neither of them said who had been counting. He took the sprig from his coat and set it in the earth at the centre of the gap, and the two curving stems leaned in over it as if they had been waiting for it.