Fine line black botanical tattoo of thin sprigs, leaves and a small succulent on the side of a person's ribs, under a dark V-neck top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line botanical sprigs on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows thin stems with small leaves and buds, plus a rounded succulent-like bloom at the lower centre, arranged in two sprigs that open outwards. The linework is fine and even, with light open shading on the leaves. It is in black ink on pale skin, and the small design sits on the side of the torso against a dark top.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Flower Leaves Sprig Succulent Bud Stem Wildflower

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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

Mrs Ada Pell had kept the boarding house at Saltcombe for thirty-one years and had never once let a guest into the back garden before the first frost. So when the young painter from Leeds asked whether she might cut a few stems for his window, she said no, then yes, then handed him the kitchen scissors with a warning about the thistles.

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He came back each morning with pencil smudges on his cuffs and wanted the names of everything. Sea kale, she told him, and the grey-leaved thing by the wall was sea holly, which would take your fingers if you let it. The fleshy rosette growing out of the slates on the outhouse roof was houseleek, though nobody had planted it there. He drew them on the backs of old ledger pages while she shelled peas on the step, and he never once asked her why the gate was always unlatched.

In October he left owing a week, and in his room she found a sheet pinned to the wardrobe door. Two sprigs, stems fine as hair, opening outwards like a pair of hands let go. In the middle, a houseleek bloom, rounded and tight. Underneath, in careful capitals, he had written: FOR THE ONE WHO KEPT THE GATE OPEN.

Ada folded it into her apron pocket and went out into the cold. She pulled the holly, left the kale, and cut one stem of sea lavender for the hallway table, where it stayed until it went papery and grey, which she decided was exactly the right colour for it.