Fine line black botanical band with peony-style flowers, leaves and script wording across a person's ribs and waist.

Floral script band across the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A wide band of black botanical linework wraps across the side of the torso, featuring a large open flower at the centre, smaller blooms, buds and sprigs of leaves. Small handwritten script runs along the left end of the band. The work uses fine, even lines with light shading and is in black ink only, set against pale skin and a striped black top and grey skirt.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Flower Peony Leaves Bud Sprig Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you lot, and mind the kettle, because this is the story of Ada Pilling and the summer she painted the Mab Rowan. Her father had the boat from the Shropshire Union before the locks rusted solid, and he'd tell anyone who'd listen that a narrowboat with no flowers on her was just a tin coffin going nowhere. So Ada took a brush and a tin of lamp black, because the red had run out and the chandler wouldn't open till Monday, and she set about the cabin side with nothing but a jam jar of water.

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She started with a peony, the big open one her gran grew by the lock gate, and she let the petals fall back the way they do when nobody is watching. Then she ran a sprig of leaves out either side, buds on thin wire stalks, and a scatter of smaller blooms as if someone had shaken a sack of seed along the paint. It took her three evenings. The lockkeeper's boy came down each dusk to read the words she'd tucked at the stern end in a hand as fine as a spider's, "live the life you love", and he asked why she bothered when no one would see it under the cratch cover.

Ada said the river saw it. Boats coming through the Blackburn cut would look up, ease off the throttle and wonder who had been so careful with a thing nobody needed to look at twice.

When the rain came in October, the black ran in long dark rivers down the cabin side, and her father stood on the towpath with his hands in his pockets. He said nothing for a while. Then he went below, came back with a fresh tin, and handed her the brush himself.