Black fine line tattoo of horizontal lines with wheat, lavender, leaves and flowers on the side of the ribs.

Horizontal lines with botanical sprigs on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A row of thin black horizontal lines runs across the skin, with botanical motifs sitting at the ends: a wheat-like ear, a sprig of lavender, an arrow-shaped leaf, several flowers and buds, and a dotted arc on the left. The linework is fine and even, with no shading, and the design is entirely black ink on pale skin. The composition is a loose rectangle sitting on the side of the torso, with a hand and grey nail partly visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Wheat Lavender Flower Leaves Bud Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the wind up here takes half of what I say and hands back the wrong half. You want the tale of Mair Tallow and the seed road over Garrow Pass? Then mind your tea.

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Every spring she walked the pass with a sack of seed knocking against her hip. The track over the top was nothing but lines, you understand, six sheep runs scratched across the hillside one above another, and nobody had ever put a single thing on them. Her mother said they were the stitching where the mountain was sewn to the sky, and Mair believed her, because her mother never told a lie that wasn't also a kindness.

So she knelt at the end of each run and planted what she had. At the top went the feathered ear of wheat her father carried home from the lowland fair. Under that, a sprig of lavender, because her sister had died in July with the smell of it on her collar and Mair would not let the hill forget. Then the arrowhead leaves, the blown-open flowers, a bud that never quite decided, and at the bottom a poppy on its own stalk. The neighbours laughed. Who sows seed on a path? But by June the lines had gone soft with growth, and the carters stopped asking the way because they could follow the flowers over the top.

The last part is the one they skip in the inns. On the windiest afternoon of that year, Mair stood at the left edge with an empty sack and blew the last of the dandelion clocks from her palm. The seeds went off in a dotted curve over the ridge, and the next spring a new run of flowers started up on the far side. That's why you'll find a stray seed in your boot on Garrow Pass, and why it's bad luck to pick one. Mind the fire now, I've talked enough for one night.