Black and grey floral vine tattoo with two flowers, a leaf and a butterfly-like shape running down the side of the ribs.

Floral vine tattoo on the side of the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a curling vine with two flowers, a pair of leaves and a large winged shape that resembles a butterfly or leaf. The linework is fine and the petals and wings are filled with soft grey shading to give some depth. The vine sweeps diagonally from the upper left to the lower right, framing the design against smooth skin and a dark garment at the bottom edge.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Flower Vine Leaf Butterfly Swirl

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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 lamp room door was propped open with a fire brick when Mam came up the lane, kettle still in her hand, and she stood in the cold doorway looking at the drawing I'd pinned above the brass lamp tallies. It was done on the back of a wage slip in grey pencil, the paper gone soft from my thumbs.

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Nobody on Scarrow Bank had ever seen a vine like the one I'd put on that slip. It came up from the bottom corner, thin as a bootlace, and curled round two flowers the size of a pit token. Nan used to say bindweed would climb anything that stood still long enough, and it had climbed the spoil heap every summer since before Dad was born. The white butterfly that lived on it, I'd shaded so its wings looked like they'd been cut from a folded note.

Mam set the kettle down. "Your dad would have laughed at that," she said, and I thought she meant the drawing, until she tapped the slip and said the colliery office had sent the final notice that morning, dated for the first Friday in March. Then she pulled the tape off the cabinet and folded the slip in four.

We walked the lane together to the fence where the bindweed had worked through the wire. She didn't mention my drawing again. The next morning the wheel at the pithead was still, and the flowers on the heap had opened anyway, pale and stubborn, tangled through the rusted gate as if someone had planted them there on purpose.