Black and grey botanical tattoo of a leafy vine with curling scrolls running down the side of a ribcage, beside a navel piercing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leafy vine tattoo on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a bare torso from the chest to the upper thighs, with a black wrap tied at the hips. A black ink vine with pointed leaves and curling scrollwork runs vertically along the side of the ribs. The linework is bold with some shading in the leaves, and the tonal contrast against the pale skin and dark background makes the design stand out.

Botanical Ribs Vine Leaves Scrollwork Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had held the yard since Boxing Day, and by the second week of January my hands had stopped feeling like mine. I went up the ladder against the north wall of the cider barn with the secateurs in my coat pocket and my father's old pruning hook hanging from my belt. The vine had been planted the year my mother left, a cutting from a neighbour's hedge, and it had since climbed the brick, over the lintel and along the gutter as if it had somewhere to be.

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Most of it was dead. Brown canes snapped under my gloves and the bark came away in strips. I worked from the bottom up, cutting to two buds on each spur the way Dad taught me, counting under my breath. Halfway along I reached a place where the stem had split and healed into a knot shaped like a fist, and beside it a tendril had wound three times round a loose nail, then doubled back on itself into a tight spiral, still green at the tip.

I should have cut it. The sensible thing was to clear the wall and burn the lot. Instead I sat on the top rung with the cold coming up through my boots and watched that little curl catch the low sun. Mrs Pryce from the next farm had told me once that a vine left one tendril unpruned would keep the rest honest through the hungry months. I had never known whether she was joking.

I left it. I tucked the cuttings into the wheelbarrow, eased the nail out with my fingers so the curl could drop free, and tied a strip of red baling twine to the bare brick beneath it so I would know where to look in April.