Watercolour-style pink and red flowers with green stems tattooed on a person's side ribs, beside the navel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour pink flowers on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large pink and red flower with soft, bleeding edges runs up the side of the torso, with a smaller flower lower down and a long green stem linking them. The petals are shaded with wet, blended washes and darker red accents, giving a painterly watercolour look. The bare skin around the tattoo and the navel fill the rest of the frame.

Botanical Ribs Flower Petal Stem Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father's brushes came up the pass on the back of a mule, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff with cold, and the first thing I did with them was ruin a good sheet of paper. I had meant to paint the saddle of the Col de Sorrel in the early light, but the rain came down off the ridge before I had wet the first wash, and the colour ran like a torn sleeve of silk across the page.

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Marthe, who keeps the inn at the summit, laughed at me and then brought me a little dish of madder root she had ground herself. She said the flowers that grow on the scree above the pass only open in the week after the snow leaves, with petals like the lips of something that has been kissed too hard, and that when rain falls on them the colour bleeds out into the stone. I did not believe her until I went up there myself with a jar of water and found the blooms fading at their edges into the grey rock, as if they were trying to keep a hold of the ground.

I tried to paint one. The stem I drew came out as a long green thread that wandered down the slope toward the gorge, and the petals I laid on top would not stay where I put them. Each time the wash touched the paper, it spread into the next bloom and the next, until the whole hillside looked like one wet flower.

I have stopped fighting the edges. Now I leave the pink to run down toward the valley, and every morning I find it has gone a little further, as though the mountain is taking its share of the paint.