Small fine line black tattoo of a botanical sprig with a few buds on the side of a torso, just below the ribs.

Fine line sprig on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small sprig of a plant with a thin central stem, several branching offshoots and clusters of tiny round buds or flowers at the tips. The linework is delicate and single-weight, with a little soft shading in the buds. The design is in black ink on pale skin, placed on the side of the ribs with a grey sweater and a beige garment around it.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Sprig Stem Branch Bud Flower Plant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamplighters of Hollin Street had a rule that nobody carried cut flowers past the canal bridge after dark, because the wet smell drew the moths and the moths drew the watchmen's attention. Agnes Pell did not hold with rules she had not been given a reason for, so on the night the bell at St Anselm's stopped mid-toll she walked the towpath with a single bent sprig of wild carrot tucked inside her coat.

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She had picked it from the gap in the wall of the tannery yard, where nothing was supposed to grow. Its stem was thin as a hair and it had gone to seed, each branch splitting into little round heads like the dandelion clocks her brother used to blow across the table at supper. She had meant to press it in her Bible. Instead she found herself at the lock gates, where old Mr Ransome sat in his hut with his lantern turned low and his hands folded over a ledger he had not opened in years.

"You're late with the water," he said, though the water was still running. He looked at the sprig and sighed. "Every spring the same. One of you brings me something green and asks me to count it."

She set it on the ledger. He counted the branches with one finger, then the buds at each tip, muttering numbers she could not follow. When he reached the last, the lantern guttered and went out, and in the dark she heard the gates open of their own accord, and the canal began to move again, carrying the sprig away down toward the river where the lamps did not reach.