Black and grey botanical tattoo of a large open bloom and a smaller ruffled flower with buds and stems, running down the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey flowers down the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large open bloom, possibly a peony or rose, with a smaller ruffled flower above it, plus buds and thin stems that trail along the side of the torso. The linework is dark and sketchy, with soft grey shading inside the petals and stamens drawn in fine marks at the centre of the main flower. The image is cropped close, with the design running diagonally up the frame over smooth, pale skin.

Botanical Ribs Flower Peony Rose Carnation Bud Stem Leaves Bloom

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

The walls of Hollin Keep had been falling for two hundred years, but the walled garden inside them never stopped blooming. Every June the peonies came up dark at the heart and ruffled at the edge, and every June the miller's boy went over the wall with a sack and came back smelling of crushed stems and sour sap.

Keep reading

Nan Ketteridge kept the gate key on a string round her neck. She sold the blooms at Thursday market for a penny a head, and with the pennies she was slowly buying slate for her cottage roof. Nobody asked where the flowers came from. The lord who built the keep was said to have buried his wife under the great rose bed, and that whoever cut the largest bloom had to carry it up to his tomb before the vespers bell, or stay beside him for good.

Ewan, Nan's grandson, was eleven and had clever hands. One June evening he took the shears and cut the widest peony he could find, a bloom as broad as a cartwheel, its centre thick with yellow threads. He ran with it through the nettles, past the chapel, and up to the tomb where the lord's stone hand lay open on the slab. The bell had not rung yet. He laid the flower in the palm, and it was heavier than a flower ought to be.

Nothing rose up. In the morning the gate stood open and the key lay in the grass. The bloom was gone from the stone, and the wall where Ewan had sat was bare no longer. Peonies and carnations climbed its ribs the whole length of the ruin, and nobody in the village could say when they had started. Nan sold none of them. She let them open.