Abstract flower tattoo with black linework and red and blue washes across the upper back, crossed by a thin line of script.

Abstract flower and script line on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bold, abstract flower sits across the upper back, its petals drawn in fine black outlines with a bursting dark centre. Red and blue wash shading spreads outward from the bloom, and a thin horizontal line runs across the shoulder blade area carrying a short line of small script. The composition is open and asymmetrical, with the design fading into loose, unfilled outlines towards the lower edge.

Back Flower Script Abstract shape Line

Find an artist for this

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

Nell pulled the string taut between the two oak posts at the top of Pennyfield and tied it off with a knot her grandfather had taught her, the one that would not slip in wet weather. It was the last Saturday in August. Wasps were drunk on the windfalls, and the grass between the rows had gone the colour of old straw.

Keep reading

Her grandfather had always said a line should be drawn before a tree was planted, so you knew where the rows ran once you could no longer see them. He had pencilled a Latin tag on the back of the orchard map, words she had never troubled to translate. Now she read them aloud to the empty trees, stumbling over the endings, and felt faintly foolish.

The bloom had come from a graft that split in the April frost. Half its petals had blown into the hedge, and the rest had opened stiff and strange, as if struck from inside. Where the fruit had burst, the centre stayed dark and sticky, and the ring of pale petals around it looked brittle enough to snap. She sat on an upturned crate and sketched it in fine black ink, ran the red of the windfall juice over the edges with a wet thumb, and took the blue from the sky she kept looking up at.

By evening the string was the only straight thing left on the hill. She cut it at the far post and let the loose end drop into the grass. The lower rows she left unpicked, their outlines still there in the dusk, waiting for someone else's hand to fill them in next year.