Small black pine tree tattoo in a fine line style on the side of the ribs, with a hand resting near the edge of the frame.

Small pine tree on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black pine or fir tree sits alone on pale skin on the side of the ribs, with its trunk pointing down. The branches are drawn as fine, sparse lines that form a tapering triangular crown, and the tattoo is shown in monochrome with no shading or colour. A hand with pale nails rests at the left edge of the frame, and a dark knitted garment fills the background.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Pine tree 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

Mrs Tregenza at Gull Rest would not let anyone sweep the windowsill where the jam jar stood. Inside it, a pine seedling no taller than a thumb had rooted in wet sand carried up from the north shore. Every guest who asked was told the same thing: the sea had taken every other tree on the headland, and this one would be the last to go.

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The summer the Harlow boy came, he was nine and would not stop picking at the scab on his wrist. He sat on the stairs and asked why a pine would grow in salt. Mrs Tregenza said pines were stubborn, that they had come down from the mountains after the ice and had never once expected kindness. She gave him a sprig to press in his schoolbook, and he took it, though he didn't believe a word of it.

The gales came in September. The jar cracked on the third night, and in the morning there was only a cold ring of water on the sill and one green needle stuck to the glass. The boy's father was out on the herring boats and would not be home before the weather turned, so the boy took the needle in his fist and walked inland with his mother's hand in his other one, past the last hedge and up onto the moor.

He planted it in a hollow where the wind could not reach, and he watered it from his own tin cup every morning until the frost. Years later, when the Harlows had long since moved away, a thin pine stood in that hollow, its branches sparse and its crown narrowing to a point. Mrs Tregenza had never once asked him for it back.