Fine line black ink tattoo of a magnolia branch with open flowers and buds on the side of the ribs, with a hand resting on white floral fabric.

Magnolia branch on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single magnolia branch with several open blooms and buds is drawn in thin black outline across the side of the ribcage. The linework is clean and even, with no shading or fill, so the flowers appear as open contours on the skin. The image has a soft, pale palette, with the tattoo as the main focus beside dark-nailed fingers resting on the fabric.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Magnolia Flower Branch Bud Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grafted magnolia at the top of Hobb's Lane had not flowered in nine years, and the postmistress, Edith Crane, said that was because nobody had asked it properly. She said this to Tom Fairley across the counter of the shop on the Thursday he came in asking for stamps he did not need.

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Tom had come back from the war with one boot and a habit of counting things. He counted the steps to the church, the bricks in the wall of the bakehouse, the number of times his mother said his name in an afternoon. Edith told him the tree wanted a branch cut from one that had already bloomed, carried down the hill and set in a jar of rainwater on the sill of a house where somebody was waiting. Tom went up the lane with his knife and found a branch with five open flowers and four closed buds, which he thought was a poor count for a miracle.

He carried it down past the chapel and the pump and the dog that never barked, and by the time he reached the gate the petals had gone the colour of cream left out too long. He set it in the jar on Mrs Pell's windowsill, because she had asked him, and because her husband had not come home from the same field. She did not thank him. She only looked at the buds and said they would open when they were ready, which was what everyone had said to him for three years.

Next morning the buds on the tree at the top of the lane had opened, every one of them, white as the inside of a shell. Tom stood under it with his hat in his hand and did not count anything at all.