Small fine line black iris with slender leaves on the side of a person's ribs, with long brown hair falling beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line iris on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small iris flower sits at the top of a thin stem with narrow leaves, drawn in fine black linework with the petals left as open outlines. The stem runs vertically down the side of the ribcage and fills only a small part of the frame. The skin is pale and evenly lit, with long wavy brown hair on the right and a plain grey background.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Iris Flower Leaves Stem

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

Dorothy never let me score the cobs before five. She said the dough needed the dark to settle, and that anyone who rushed a blade through it before the oven had woken would get a flat, sulky crumb. So I stood at the steel table in the cold while the street outside was still ink, and watched her hands.

Keep reading

She used a bread lame with a blade no longer than a thumbnail, and the cuts she made were not the usual slashes. Each one was a line that curved up from the base of the loaf and split at the top into a bloom of six narrow petals. "Iris," she said, when I finally asked. "My mother's flower. She grew them in a tin bath behind the shop, the year the mill closed." She drew the stem down the flank of the loaf in one pull, then flicked a few leaves off it, quick as a signature.

By half four the trays were full of them, dozens of small irises gone pale under the flour, and I started to think of the bakery as a garden nobody would ever see. Dorothy's sister came in at quarter to six for the first batch, saw the racks and went quiet. She picked up a loaf and turned it over in both hands for a long time before she paid.

"She'd have liked you," Dorothy said, which she had never said before. The ovens ticked as they heated. I took the lame from the table and made my first cut, a single crooked stem, and the bloom came out lopsided. She said it was perfect and slid it into the oven before I could fix it.