Fine line black ink tattoo of a curling vine with a ladybird, a small flower and a tendril on the outer ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ladybird and vine on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black stem curls up the outer ankle, with a spotted ladybird near the lower end, a small star-shaped flower and a curled tendril. The linework is fine and even, with dotted accents along the stem and only light shading. The black ink sits against pale skin and a dark background, with the design following the curve of the ankle.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Vine Ladybird Flower Tendril Leaf Stem

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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

Put the kettle back on the hob, boy, and stop blowing on your fingers. You want the tale or you want to stand there staring at the bread? Right, then. The bean vine came aboard at Valparaiso in a clay pot no bigger than my fist, and the cook before me, a Shetlander called Tam Fraser, swore it was the only green thing that ever made the Gannet's passage without going yellow.

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It climbed the galley bulkhead, up past the stovepipe, and wound itself round the brass rail above the sink. Every morning a ladybird walked down the stem to hunt the aphids, slow as a deacon, her spots counted out like beads on a rosary. Tam named her Mrs Pickering after a magistrate's wife in Leith who had once shouted at him in the street. Three weeks of grey water rolled past the porthole, and that beetle never once took a wrong turn.

Then we caught the Horn in a gale. The stove went out, the lamp swung on its hook, and when the watch came below soaked to the bone, the vine had been torn half off the rail. Mrs Pickering sat on the lowest leaf, and beside her one small star of a flower had opened, pale as a coin. Tam crouched by the pot and said nothing. He only pinched a leaf between finger and thumb and passed it round, a little sour and a little green, and we ate it the way you'd take communion.

Do you know what he found in the hold at Rio? Not one weevil in the flour. Every sack was sound, and the old beetle had been working the bins all night while the rest of us slept. Tam said the vine had never needed the galley at all. It only needed something small enough to keep it company. Now, the bread's ready. Mind your fingers.