Close-up of a small fine line botanical tattoo of a thin sprig with buds and leaves in black ink, sitting on the neck behind an ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line sprig behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small sprig with a thin stem, two round buds and a few narrow leaves is tattooed on the skin behind the ear. The linework is delicate and fine, in black ink with no shading, and the design is shown against a soft, neutral skin tone. Hair and the edge of a grey garment frame the image, which is a close, tightly cropped view of the tattoo.

Fine line Botanical Neck Sprig Bud Leaves Stem Flower

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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

The hall still smells of the floor polish it did in 1998, and somebody has pinned old class photographs to a board beside the urn. You find Mr Okonedo first, greyer now, laughing at something outside the frame. Dana Pryce pushes a plastic cup of squash into your hand and asks, before hello, whether you still have the campion.

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You do. It lives in a jam jar on a windowsill above a launderette in Leeds, the dried head of a flower that grew through the crack beside the bike sheds the summer you were both fourteen. Dana dared you to pick it. You refused, then pocketed two buds when the caretaker wasn't looking and pressed them between the pages of a geography atlas until they were as thin as tissue. You never told her you had kept the second one too.

"I thought you'd lost it," Dana says, and when you admit the atlas went to a charity shop in 2004, she laughs so hard that a teacher you don't recognise looks over. Then she tells you the sheds were pulled down two winters ago and the car park has been resurfaced twice since. Neither of you says what that means for the crack.

After the buffet, you walk over anyway. The bike sheds are gone, the tarmac is fresh and black, and the playground fence is a row of chain-link panels that rattle when you lean on them. Dana crouches at the kerb, angling her phone torch along a line where the new surface has not quite met the old wall. There, pale against the grit, a thin green stem has pushed itself up, and at its tip two buds are tightly closed, as if they have only just noticed that the summer has come round again.