Close side view of a fine line black sprig tattoo with small leaf marks on the ribs, beside a tiny tick mark and a dark natural spot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line sprig on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A slim black sprig, drawn as a single vertical stem with small leaf marks along it, sits on the side of the ribcage. A tiny tick or V-shaped mark sits lower and to the right, and a small dark spot on the skin appears to be a natural mark rather than ink. The linework is thin and even, and the palette is black on pale skin against a grey backdrop and a dark loose top.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Sprig Stem Leaves Minimal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sprig came up through a crack beside the bin chute on the ninth floor of Coldharbour House, the spring the lifts stopped for a month. Nobody planted it. Mrs Dunmore from flat 41 said it was a seed off the wind, and Tomas from 44 said it was a seed off the pigeons, and they argued about it on the stairs while the sprig grew a leaf a day.

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By summer it stood as tall as a child's arm, and the children counted its leaves each morning on the way to school. Whenever one fell, somebody made a chalk tick on the wall beside it. By August the wall had more ticks than the council had sent letters, and the caretaker, Mr Ruiz, stopped scrubbing them off.

In September the lifts were fixed and the estate was sold, and the man who came to measure the flats said the crack would need filling. Mrs Dunmore went down with a pair of scissors and a jam jar of water. She cut one stem with its small leaves still on and carried it up nine floors in her cardigan pocket, because she said a thing that grows out of a wall ought to be taken somewhere it can keep growing.

The new flats on the hill had windows that did not open. Tomas said the stem would die there, and it did not. It put out one leaf for every year Mrs Dunmore lived beside it, and when she finally went, Mr Ruiz's grandson counted seven leaves and one small tick on the sill, which nobody could explain and nobody tried to rub off.