Black fine line drawing of two olive branches with leaves and olives meeting at their stems on a white background, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Fine line olive branch design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a line drawing of two olive branch sprigs, each with pointed leaves and small rounded olives, meeting at a central stem. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the design is drawn in black ink on plain white paper. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with plenty of empty space around the motif.

Fine line Botanical Leaves Sprig Foliage Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well at Hollin Cross had gone dry the summer the old woman's son went over the sea, and the village said the water had followed him. Nessa, who kept the orchard wall for the parish, did not believe in following. She believed in roots, and so when the terraces above the chapel began to crack she went up with a spade and a bucket and dug where her grandmother had told her to dig, under the one tree no one else would touch.

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The tree was an olive, grey-barked and bent like an old man reaching for a dropped coin. Nobody in Hollin had ever seen it fruit. Nessa knelt in its shade and found the water four hands down, cold as a knife, and she was so glad she laughed out loud, which startled a goat from the hedge and made her laugh harder.

When she carried the first bucket down to the square, the women were already waiting with their jugs. They asked where she had found it. She told them. They asked what the price was, because there is always a price in Hollin, and she said she did not know yet. That night she cut two sprigs from the tree, one for the chapel door and one for the old woman's window, and tied them with red wool so the two ends met in the middle, as a bargain should.

In the spring the sprigs had rooted in the mud by the gate. Nobody remembered planting them. The old woman's son came home that autumn, thinner and sunburnt, and found the olives hanging green and small on both branches, and he stood a long while in the lane, counting them.