Colour botanical tattoo of a lavender sprig with wheat-like stems and green leaves on the left side of a ribcage, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lavender sprig on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A bundle of lavender stems with purple flower spikes, green leaves and two wheat-like heads is tied at the base with a thin band, with a small root shown at the bottom. The linework is fine and even, with soft shading in the leaves and stems. Purple and green ink sit on the left side of the ribs, with the design angled upwards and the rest of the torso left bare.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Lavender Sprig Wheat Leaves Herb Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's still wet from the sluice, and keep your hands off the proving drawers till I say. Right. Pull that stool up to the oven mouth, where the heat can find your knees. Before the first batch comes out I'll tell you about the bundle hanging over the flour bin, the one with the purple heads gone grey at the tips.

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Mrs Ferrier tied it herself the spring her husband died. She'd picked a fistful of lavender from the verge behind the chapel, two ears of wheat saved from the last sack off the Wigan cart, and a root she dug up with a hairpin because she wouldn't say what it was for. She told me lavender kept the moths out of the grain. She never said what the wheat was for. I asked once, and she said bread is only ever two things, and the rest is you paying attention.

Years later a lad called Tom came to scrape the trays for a shilling a week. He was careless with the peel and cried over burnt rye, and he never once thought the bundle was anything but dusty. The winter the mill shut, he found the sack empty and the bundle cut loose from its nail, lying on the bench in a ring of flour. He tied it back with the same thread, knotted badly, and he was up before the carts every morning after.

So when you smell that, and you will in a minute, when the crusts go gold and the lavender starts to rise off the warm racks, that's Tom's doing, and Mrs Ferrier's before him. Now hand me the long peel. No, the long one. There we are. Listen to the bottoms ring when you knock them. That's the sound of a bakery waking up.