Black and grey realism tattoo of dogwood blossoms, lily-style flowers and leaves spreading across a person's back, shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey dogwood flowers on back and shoulder

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral tattoo covers the upper back, shoulder and upper arm, with dogwood blossoms, lily-like flowers, leaves and a thin branch. The linework is fine and the petals and leaves are built up with smooth grey shading that gives them depth and a realistic, three-dimensional look. The design is entirely black and grey and flows diagonally from the shoulder blade over the top of the arm.

Realism Botanical Back Shoulder Upper arm Flower Blossom Lily Leaf Branch Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook had the stove lit before the bell, and the boy Tobias came down the companionway carrying a branch he had no business bringing aboard. It was dogwood, cut from the hedge at the top of Hallow Lane, and the flowers on it were white going to cream at the edges, four petals to each one, with a dark knot of seed in the middle.

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"Put that in the water butt and the mates will laugh at you," Cook said, not looking up from the onions. "Dogwood's for crosses, not galleys."

Tobias set it down anyway. His gran had told him the old story, and he told it now while the pan spat. Once the dogwood was a great tall tree, straight as a mast, and its wood was taken for a beam. It was ashamed of the work it had been put to, so it shrank down to a bush that could hide under a hedge, and it changed its blossom. Each flower got four petals, and on each petal a small mark where a nail had gone in, and the centre grew a crown of little points like thorns. Nobody could cut it now without seeing what it had carried.

"Your gran made that up," Cook said, but she turned the onions twice before she said anything else. The ship lifted and dropped, and the lamp swung, and the men came down in twos for their dinners. Nobody mentioned the branch. By the second watch its flowers had opened wide in the tin mug on the shelf, and the lamp caught the grey shadows under each petal, so that the whole thing looked like a little weather of its own.

At the end of the night Cook stood by the mug with her hands in her apron. "Leave it where it is," she said. "The men can walk round it."