Fine line black tattoo of a small botanical sprig with budding stems on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small sprig tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a slender sprig with two curving stems, each carrying clusters of tiny round buds, sits on the side of the ribcage. The linework is thin and even, with the buds built up using small dots and short strokes in black ink. The sprig is placed off-centre on bare skin against a plain light background, with plenty of space around it.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Sprig Branch Bud Herb Plant

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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 fair pulled out of Thornwick on the second Sunday of September, and Nell Haskett was still on her knees behind the lorry, picking the last of the sprigs from the crate her father had left under the tailboard. He had always said a cutting taken in a hurry would root if you pressed it into something wet. So she pressed them into the ditch at the edge of the field, one by one, while the generator coughed itself quiet and the ride men shouted about the trailer hitch.

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The sprigs were nothing to look at. Two thin stems arched out from a single knot, each one hung with little round buds like beads strung on wire, and her father sold them at the gate for a penny to anyone who asked what they were for. Most people did not ask. They wanted to be told the sprig was for luck, or for the bees, or for a lad they had once met on the Ferris wheel, and he told them whatever they needed to hear and took their pennies.

Nell did not believe in luck. She believed in the way the ditch water shone under the lamp and in the ache across her shoulders from the crate. By the time the lorry rolled onto the A17 the sky had gone the colour of pewter, and she could not have said which of the cuttings she had planted would take.

Next spring, walking the same field alone, she found a green fleck of stem breaking the mud and crouched down to count the buds forming on it. There were seven. She counted them twice, then went back to the gate to tell her father, and found him already sitting in the cab with the engine running, waiting for her to climb in.