Black and grey botanical tattoo of an oak leaf with hatched veins running up the left ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Oak leaf on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large oak leaf with lobed edges and a central vein runs diagonally up the side of the ribs. The leaf is drawn in dark outline with fine hatched lines filling the lobes and veins, giving it a shaded, textured look. The plain skin and white fabric at the top and left of the frame keep the focus on the leaf.

Botanical Ribs Leaf Vein

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had pressed the oak leaf inside her hymn book before the band struck up, so it would be flat by the time Walter came for the second waltz. It had fallen on the Hallgate steps that morning, lobed and ragged at the edges, its veins drawn out so finely that she could see where each one met the central rib. She thought it looked like something a draughtsman would sit over for an hour, shading every lobe by hand.

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The Mechanics' Hall smelled of coal smoke, floor polish and wet wool. Walter trod on her toes twice in the foxtrot and apologised both times, and she laughed so loudly that Mrs Pryce at the door shushed them. He had come up from the yard at Stockton with a new cough and a letter from the Admiralty folded in his breast pocket, and he mentioned neither until the band packed away its instruments.

Outside, under the lamp by the wall, he asked whether she would keep the leaf. She said she would, and slid it between the pages of the Book of Ruth where nobody would think to look.

The next spring the oak on Hallgate Row came into leaf again, ragged-edged and full of veins. Ada walked past it every morning on the way to the mill, counting the lobes under her breath, and waited for a letter that might come or might not.