Black tribal band with teal accents and a shaded flower wrapping across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal band with flower on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A bold tribal-style band of black linework wraps around the side of the torso, with swirls, curved bars and a row of dots along its lower edge. A shaded flower, likely a lily or dahlia, sits at the left end of the band, with grey shading and some black detail. Small areas of teal fill sit within the tribal pattern against a warm, smooth skin tone.

Botanical Ribs Flower Lily Swirl Scrollwork Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats of Skerry Cove had gone out three nights running and come back with nothing but weed in their nets, so when the widow Ailsa Corran walked down to the slipway with a coil of tarred rope over her shoulder, the men stopped mending to watch her.

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She had lost a husband to the Sound the winter before, and everyone knew it. What they did not know was the saying her mother had taught her, that the sea keeps what it is owed and gives back what is offered freely. Ailsa worked the rope into a band, black and looping, the way her mother had worked the wards on the hulls, with a row of small hitches along one edge like a tally of days. Then she waded out to the flat rock where the water turned from teal to green over the sand, and she laid the band down on the stone.

By morning a lily had come up through the seam of that rope, pale as a candle, its petals shaded grey where the cliff's shadow fell across them. The fleet hauled in so heavy that Tomas Brodie's boat listed and had to be bailed twice. Nobody asked her what she had given. The fish, the old men said, had come for the flower.

Ailsa only smiled and went back to her mending. Each dawn she walked out to check the band, and each dawn there were fewer hitches on the rope and more curls where the tide had teased the strands into scrolls. When the last hitch was gone, the lily had gone with it, and the men found the widow's rope tied neatly round the mooring post at the head of the slipway, with one dark loop left over for whoever came next.