Small black fine line botanical tattoo of a lavender sprig with leaves on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lavender sprig on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small sprig of lavender-like flower spikes and feathery leaves is tattooed on the side of the ribs, with the stems tapering down towards the lower body. The linework is thin and mostly solid black, with some shading in the leaves and flower heads. The tattoo is shown in profile against a pale wall and sits on bare skin above a navy top.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Lavender Sprig Flower Leaves Botanical

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lavender had been slow that summer, the spikes coming late and thin on the terraces above Polwen, and Thea Pascoe was still cutting it at dusk when the Mary Ann came round the harbour wall with no one waving from her deck. Behind the cottages her father's still ticked as it cooled. Joss Trewin was first off the boat, and he did not take the slipway up to the shop the way he usually did. He came straight up the terrace path, boots loud on the stones, and stood at the bottom of the rows with his cap in his hands.

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"Need a sprig," he said. "For Eli's mother. She'll want something that isn't from the chapel." Thea knew what he meant without him saying more. Eli had gone over the side off the Hallows in the gale, and the boat had come home a man short. She walked the row with the shears and chose the stem with the most flower heads and the feathery leaves still green at their base, the way her father had taught her. She bound it with tarred twine from the nail by the door, and the knot sat neat against the stalk.

Joss turned the bundle over and frowned at the place where the stems thinned to nothing. "Looks like it's going somewhere," he said. Thea told him that was the point of a sprig, you cut it so it could travel. He tucked it inside his jacket against his chest, and she watched him go down the path toward the cottages with the lavender showing at his collar like a second, smaller tide.

Three weeks later he came back with the sprig dried and pale, the flowers gone grey-violet, and set it on her counter. "Mrs Ellery kept it on the windowsill," he said. "Said it smelled of him when he was small, which I don't believe, but there it is." He left coins for the shears and went out. Thea hung the sprig upside down from the beam above the still, where the steam rose past it and the leaves kept their shape.