Black ink tribal-style tattoo with hibiscus and plumeria flowers covering a woman's ribs and flank, with a smaller floral piece on her upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ink Polynesian-style side piece with flowers

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's torso is shown from the side, with a large black tattoo wrapping the ribs, flank and hip. The design combines bold tribal-style curves and bands of fine patterned linework with outlined hibiscus and plumeria flowers. The piece is shaded in black and grey on a light background, with a smaller floral tattoo visible near the upper shoulder.

Botanical Ribs Shoulder Flower Hibiscus Plumeria Swirl Pattern Wave

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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 hibiscus came over in a biscuit tin, packed in wet newspaper and two pairs of your husband's socks, so I suppose it has travelled further than either of us expected. The man at the post desk held the tin up to the light as if it might be contraband. I told him it was for looking at, which was true enough. Nobody in Preston sends a plant to Apia and expects it to arrive alive, but you did, and now there is a green stick in a jam jar on my kitchen sill.

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The cutting took three months to root. I kept it in the propagator at the back of the glasshouse, where the heating pipes knock all night like someone wanting in. Every morning I checked the stem for the wet, folding lines you used to draw on the back of my hand when we were girls, black bands turning over each other like a tide coming across sand. I never saw them on the plant. I only saw the buds, small and tight and sulking about the cold.

In March the first bud opened on a Tuesday, the frost only just lifted off the car park. Five petals the colour of a bruised peach, with a red throat like a lamp left on in a window. I rang you before I rang anyone else. You didn't answer, because it was the middle of your night, so I held the phone to the glass and let the flower do the talking.