Back view of a woman in a black open-back knit top showing a small fine line botanical tattoo of a lavender sprig on her upper back.

Fine line lavender sprig on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small sprig of lavender-style flowers with a thin stem and two leaves sits on the side of the upper back, angled diagonally. The linework is delicate and the detail is mostly in the flower head, with light, soft shading in a single dark ink. The bare back fills most of the frame against a plain light wall, with the tattoo as the only ink visible.

Fine line Botanical Back Lavender Sprig Flower Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook on the Hollin Mary kept a bundle of lavender hung from the galley beam, and nobody else on board was allowed to touch it. The biscuit went soft in that damp and the salt pork greened at the edges, but the bread in the locker under her bunk stayed sweet, and the men said it was the lavender that kept the air clean. Mrs Jessop said it was only lavender, and that a cook who could not keep her own bread dry had no business blaming flowers.

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The ship's boy, Tobias Vane, was eleven and small enough to fit in the gap behind the water casks. He loved the galley more than anything in the world, and one night off the Dogger Bank he took a single stem from the bundle and pushed it inside his shirt, meaning to put it back before morning. The sea got up before he could. The Hollin Mary rolled so far that the pans came off their hooks, the lamp went over, and the galley filled with smoke that smelt of hot fat and something green.

Mrs Jessop found him at dawn sitting on the coal sacks with the stem held flat against his chest. She did not shout. She took the sprig, crushed one flower between her thumb and finger, and held it under his nose until he stopped shaking. Then she tied it back on the beam with a length of tarred twine and told him that a thing given to the galley is never stolen, only borrowed by whoever is brave enough to carry it.

Tobias kept his own sprig pressed in a tin under his bunk for the rest of his working life, and never told anyone where it had come from. When the Hollin Mary was broken up at Hartlepool he was the last man off her. He walked up the quay with the tin in his pocket and the smell of the galley still on his fingers.