Black and grey botanical tattoo of a leafy sprig with solid filled leaves on the back of the neck, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy botanical sprig on the nape of the neck

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a slender branch with several solid black leaves and small buds, running vertically down the back of the neck. The leaves are filled in with dense black ink, with fine stems and small details along the branch, and the tone is a soft grey-black against the skin. The left photo shows the design straight on, and the right photo is a closer angle of the same tattoo against a dark background.

Botanical Blackwork Neck Leaves Branch Sprig Plant Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herb woman of Carrick Pass had taught her daughter that every sprig of rosemary, sorrel and wild thyme had a season when it would tell the truth if you pinched it. Ruth had never believed her. She stood now at the stone wall above the sheep fold with a bundle of cut stems in her apron and the wind coming up the valley hard enough to bend the bracken flat. Below, her brother Tam was shouting at a ewe that had got its horn caught in the wire.

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She pressed a leaf between finger and thumb, the way her mother had shown her, and waited. The leaf stayed quiet. Then the branch in her other hand, the slender one with its three little buds still closed, gave a small warm pulse against her palm, like a pulse under a thumb at the neck. She looked down the slope to the farmhouse, where the lamp was lit in the kitchen window though it was not yet dusk, and understood that her mother had not gone to the market in Lanark that morning. She had gone to the lower gate, and was waiting there with the gate-chain in her hand.

Ruth tucked the sprig behind her ear, where the stalk would not show, and went down to Tam. When she reached the fold the ewe had stopped struggling and was watching her with a gold, patient eye. Ruth knelt, untangled the wire with fingers that did not shake, and said quietly to her brother, "Mother is at the gate. Walk slowly." She did not look at the lamp again. The wind dropped as they crossed the yard, and for the first time in her life the herbs in her apron were silent.