Black and white photo of a fine line tulip tattoo with a long looping stem on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line tulip on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line tulip with a rounded bloom and a long, looping stem is tattooed on the side of the torso. The linework is thin and mostly unshaded, with slight variation in weight along the bloom and a doubled loop near the base of the stem. The black and white photograph is softly lit and shows the skin texture around the design, with the tattoo placed diagonally across the ribs.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Tulip Flower Stem Leaf

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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 rain had got under the awning by eleven, so I moved the tulips to the back of the barrow where the cardboard was still dry. Nobody buys flowers in weather like this. They come in for a sausage roll and leave with a paper bag they never meant to carry.

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My father sold these same bulbs from this pitch for thirty-one years, and he had a habit I never understood. He would take a stub of carpenter's pencil and draw a tulip on the back of every receipt before he handed it over, the bloom a round cup, the stem one long pull down the paper without lifting the point. He never lifted it. When I asked him why, he said a line you lift is just two lines pretending to be one.

A woman in a yellow mac stopped by the barrow and asked for six red ones, then changed her mind to four, then asked if I could just do one on her receipt the way the old man used to. I said I was no good at drawing. She said nobody on this market was good at anything, that was the charm of a Thursday. So I took the pencil.

The bloom came out lopsided, the stem wandered, and near the bottom I doubled back on myself, looping once to hide a wobble. I looked at it and thought it was ruined. She folded the receipt into her coat pocket and said that was the bit she liked best, the place where somebody had clearly stopped to think.