Black and grey fine line tattoo of three tulips on a stem with two leaves, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line tulips on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three tulip heads on thin stems with two slender leaves, forming a loose sprig. The linework is delicate and even, with light stippling and shading inside the petals. The photograph is in black and white, and the sprig sits diagonally on the side of the torso beneath a lifted garment and a dark lace bra strap.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Tulip Flower Stem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook had told the boy three times to leave the crate alone, so on the ninth day out of Texel the boy lifted the lid while the cook was at the pump. Inside, packed in wet sawdust, lay three bulbs wrapped in brown paper, each as pale and knobbed as a child's fist. The cook had paid more for them than for the ship's last barrel of salt pork, and he had sworn to the captain that they would reach Batavia alive.

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The boy had no notion of flowers. In his village only cabbages grew, and quarrels. He held one bulb to his nose and smelled earth and something sweeter, like the crust of a loaf. That night he crept back and set the three bulbs in a tin of galley water beside the stove, where the heat would tell them they were somewhere warm. The sailors came in to thaw their fingers, saw the tin, and laughed until one of them spilled his tea.

Weeks went by. The water turned green and then clear again. White threads curled from the bulbs toward the stove door, and one morning three stems stood up with closed green heads on them. Then the heads opened, cup-shaped and red as a cooked prawn, and two narrow leaves unfolded along the stems like the sides of a cupped hand. The cook came in with the morning biscuit, stopped in the doorway, and said nothing at all for a long time.

When the ship tied up at Batavia, the cook wrapped the three stems in damp cloth and carried them down the gangway himself. He did not sell them. He gave them to a woman in a yellow shawl who had once fed him when he was ill, and the boy, who had expected a flogging, was given the last of the sugar instead.