Small black branching tree tattoo in a fine line botanical style on the side of a person's ribs.

Small branching tree on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black tree with a single straight trunk and thin, spreading branches sits on the side of the ribcage. The linework is clean and even, with the branches tapering to fine points and no shading. The tattoo is shown in close view against light skin, with a white vest top and a black crop top framing the area.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Tree Branches

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tree for sixty miles is the one you stop beside, mostly because the Land Rover has decided to die on the shoulder of the Kessel road and nothing else out here is worth looking at. It stands where the tarmac gives up, one straight grey trunk with branches that thin into fine black points, as if someone started a drawing and lost patience with the ink. Your uncle called it the surveyor's joke. A man planted it a century ago to mark a well that dried up before the railway came.

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Teodor from the petrol station has promised a jerrycan by dusk, so you sit in the strip of shade and count the branches. You reach two hundred and eleven, lose your place, and start again, because counting is easier than listening for an engine that may never come. The sand ticks against the bonnet as it cools. Somewhere a dog barks twice and gives up.

A lorry pulls onto the verge just as the light goes orange. The driver leans out and asks whether you have seen a grey dog with one ear. You have not. He says it belongs to his sister, who once sat under this exact tree and swore she would marry the first man to bring her water, and that she married a tinsmith from the coast instead and never once came back to dig. He unscrews his flask, pours you a cup you did not ask for, and does not seem to expect thanks.

When the jerrycan finally bumps up the road in the dark, you have stopped counting. Looking back at the tree in the headlights, you see that its shadow has swung across the sand and now points at the road you came from, thin as a line of ink. Teodor says the old well is still down there, twelve feet under the roots, and that the tree has been drinking from it for a hundred years without anyone asking it to.