Back of a person with short hair showing a small black fine-line botanical sprig tattoo on the upper back, near the base of the neck.

Fine line sprig tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small sprig or branch with thin, curved stems and tiny leaves or sprouts is tattooed on the upper back, just below the nape of the neck. The linework is delicate and uniform in black ink, with no shading. The plain pale wall behind and a striped top on the shoulder keep the focus on the tattoo.

Fine line Botanical Back Sprig Branch Leaves Plant

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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 cutting had spent five weeks in a jam jar on the potting shed windowsill, and Nell still couldn't tell whether it had died or was merely thinking things over. Her grandfather would have known. He used to hold a stem up to the light and say the green showed itself to anyone patient enough to look for it.

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She had taken it from the quince by the back gate, the last thing Albert planted before his knees gave out. He had been firm about the rules. Only wood that bends, never wood that snaps. Two nodes at least. Cut just below the joint with the old penknife, then strip the lower leaves so the stem has nothing to feed but the root it wants to make. She had done all of it, forgotten the jar for a fortnight, then remembered again on a wet Tuesday with the glass already furred with dust.

When she tipped the sprig onto newspaper on Sunday, a pale fuzz of roots had come through at the base, fine as cobweb. The quince was gone. The council had cleared the frontage in April, and all that was left by the gate was a stump and a square of churned mud. So she carried the cutting round to the south wall of the cottage, where a crack in the mortar held a thread of soil, and pressed it in. To keep it upright she bound it to a bamboo cane with two strips torn from one of Albert's old shirts, crossed once and knotted.

By the next morning the tip had turned towards the window, the way his stems always had, reaching for whatever light was left in the afternoon.