Back view of a shirtless person with black and grey botanical tattoos of flowers, vines and moths covering the back, shoulders, upper arms, forearms and hands.

Back and full sleeves of botanical and moth tattoos

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoos cover the back, both arms and both hands, with flowers, leaves, vines and several moths and butterflies. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading built up through hatching and stippling rather than solid fills. The design flows across the back and down the arms in a loose, branching composition, and the image is shot against a plain pale wall.

Botanical Fine line Back Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Hand Flower Leaf Vine Moth Butterfly Tulip Peony Carnation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moths came to the Harrow kitchen the week after the first frost, when the peonies had been cut to the ground and nobody in Fenwick Cross would say whose garden had gone to seed first. Nell's mother put a saucer of sugar water on the sill and told her not to touch them. Moths, she said, were only the dead looking for the lamp they had left lit.

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Nell did not believe that, but she believed in the carnation bed behind the chapel, where her grandfather had planted a row for every child born in the parish, and where the blooms came up pinned at the throat like buttons. She knew the tulips were for brides and the peonies were for the men who did not come back from the war. She knew because her grandfather had told her so, and because he had never once been wrong about a bulb.

In March the vines started up the side of the barn without anyone planting them. Mr Pell at the post office said it was the damp. Nell's mother said it was the moths, carrying seed on their wings from one grave to the next. The vines crept along the lanes and over the stone wall, and by Easter there were leaves growing through the chapel door.

On the morning the vicar's boy came running with his shoes undone, Nell went out with her sleeves rolled and a pair of shears. She did not cut the vines. She sat on the wall with the dew soaking through her skirt and waited until a moth lifted from the carnations and settled on the back of her hand, wings open like a page, and she said her grandfather's name aloud until the lane went quiet.