Black fine line tattoo of a thin botanical sprig with small leaves and buds on a person's ribs, with a red lace top and gingham skirt visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line sprig tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black sprig with small leaves, buds and tiny flower heads rises diagonally up the side of the ribcage. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the design is set against plain, lightly toned skin. Red lace and black and white gingham in the background make the tattoo the main point of focus.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Sprig Branch Leaves Bud 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

Sit closer, the lot of you, the canvas has more holes than a mayor's promises and the wind wants its share. In the spring of 1951 the Pell Brothers' Travelling Marvels had one thing left that the bank had not carried off, and that was a painted wagon with a stuck door and a girl called Nell Ashby who could name every wild plant between here and the coast. Nobody paid to see a lion any more. They had sold the lions. What they had was green things, and Nell knew where to find them.

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Each morning before the ring was swept she walked the ditch behind the sidings and cut a sprig of meadowsweet, its leaves small and toothed, its buds tight as pins, its flower heads like a scatter of spilt salt. She pinned one to the wagon door, one to the lamp hook, and one to the brim of the old ringmaster's hat, which he wore for the last three villages out of pure stubbornness. Mr Gideon Pell laughed at her for it. Green isn't a turn, he said. Show them a tiger.

By June the wagon was promised to a scrap man from Doncaster. Nell went to the ditch one last time and came back with a single branch, the buds still closed. She stood the cut end in a jar of rainwater on the wagon step. Put it in the ground after the first frost, she told the old man, and see what it does. He thought she was simple. He took the wagon anyway, and the scrap man hauled it off behind a lorry with the jar still sitting on the step, because nobody had thought to take it in.

Some autumn a lad from the scrapyard swore he found meadowsweet growing through a split floorboard on the far side of the Don, small and white, with its buds still closed, and no one had ever seen a flower come up through a wagon floor. Make of that what you will. Mind the step going out. The frost is down, and the ditch is still full of green.