Black and grey blackwork tattoo of floral swirls and vines on the side of a torso above the hip, with a jeans waistband and rhinestone skull buckle visible.

Black floral swirl tattoo on the side of the torso

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a torso, cropped below the chest and above the hips, showing a black blackwork tattoo of thin, sweeping vines, scrolls and small star-like flowers. The linework is bold and smooth, with tapered strokes that curl upwards towards the ribs. The image is essentially monochrome apart from the blue denim jeans and a rhinestone skull buckle at the bottom of the frame.

Blackwork Botanical Ribs Swirl Vine Flower Star Scroll Flourish Skull Jeans

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 rolls for the clerk at the Serapeum were always due by the new moon, and Hermon never let me forget it. I ground the soot and gum in the back room of his shop off the Canopic Way while he sat by the window with a cup of sour wine, shouting out which scroll was owed to whom. My work was the margins. Anyone can copy a contract. Only a patient hand can make acanthus curl the way a cat stretches in the sun, thin as a hair at the tip and thick where it grows from the root.

Keep reading

The commission that spring came from a widow who wanted her husband's name framed in climbing stems. She paid in advance and stood at my elbow, watching every stroke. When I finished the first sheet she pointed at one of the small star-shaped blooms and asked why it had five petals when her garden had six. I told her the star was the only thing on the page that did not have to grow. She laughed, which I had not heard from anyone in that street, and asked me to keep the spare copy for myself.

I kept it rolled in linen at the bottom of my chest for two years. Hermon died in the heat of summer, and his cousin sold the reeds and the soot in one lot, the shop included. When the cousin found my drawing and sent it on to the widow with a bill for the ink, she returned it unopened, a single bronze coin tucked inside. Beneath the coin, in a hand as careful as my own, she had written one line: the vines have grown too long, come and prune them.