Colour tattoo of red roses, green leaves and a small fairy with swirling vines along a person's side from the ribs to the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral swirls and fairy on the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The design shows red roses and pink blossoms, green leaves and dark grey swirling vines running from under the breast down to the hip. A small winged fairy sits among the foliage near the lower waist. The linework is soft with grey shading, and red and green ink add colour to the flowers and leaves.

Botanical Ribs Rose Flower Fairy Vine Swirl Leaves Blossom

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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

You hear the shears before you see her, a small dry click from the far end of the yard where the climbing roses have got over the wall again. It is past midnight in Leeds and the streetlamp buzzes orange over the bins. Nobody else is awake on Cardigan Row except the cat from number nine and the fairy who keeps the honeysuckle, and she is not pleased with you.

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She is perched on the top rail of the gate, wings folded like wet tissue, in a dress the colour of old moss. "You let it run," she says. "Look at that bramble. Look what the vine did to the sill." The red blooms on the wall are heavy and open, and the swirling stems have crept up the drainpipe as if they were planning a bigger house. You tell her the landlord will have the lot cut down on Monday. She laughs, a sound like a kettle left on a low hob. "Then we had better finish the job tonight."

You work together until the sky greys over the chimneys. She shows you where to cut so the stems will come back thicker, which petals to leave for the bees, which leaves hold the dew longest. Her hands are quick and cold. Twice she stops to tell you the names of the flowers, the pink ones first, then the rose, then the old one with no name at all, the one that only grows where someone has been unhappy for a long time.

At dawn she flies up the drainpipe and is gone among the leaves. When the landlord's van pulls in on Monday, the wall is bare as a page. On Tuesday there is one new bud, red as a fingertip, tucked where the vine meets the brick, and it is not going anywhere.