Back tattoo of black ornamental lace-style linework with leaves and a mandala flower, plus realistic pink orchids and a tiger head, running down the spine and lower back.

Black lace floral back tattoo with orchids

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bare back shows a long tattoo running from the upper back down to the waist, built from black ornamental linework resembling lace, with scrolling vines, leaves, a mandala-style flower and a tiger's head. Near the lower back, three pink orchids are shaded with soft tonal gradients and realistic petal detail. The composition follows the curve of the spine, with the black filigree framing the coloured flowers at the base.

Botanical Realism Back Lace Filigree Leaves Vine Orchid Flower Mandala Tiger Cat Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody tells you the tiger is the last thing to leave a travelling show, Mae. The elephants go first, then the horses, then the girl who could walk the wire blindfold. The tiger stays because he is too proud to be sold to a man with a van. Pull your chair closer. The fire is poor tonight, and I am not telling this one twice.

Keep reading

The Corvin Brothers' Grand Pavilion had once folded its canvas over four counties, but by the autumn of the great frost it was a single tent pitched on a rented field outside Hexworth, with rust-coloured lace showing through the seams. Old Ottoline Brand kept the lamps lit and the ledger balanced. She kept the tiger too, a striped beast named Sabel who had been painted onto the posters since before she was born. Every night she fed him herself, and every night he looked at the ringmaster's boots as if they owed him money.

One night a boy arrived with a letter and no coat. He said his mother had sent him to find the show, and that he could mend anything with a needle. Ottoline gave him a bowl of broth and set him to work on the costumes. He stitched black silk into scrolls and vines across the torn bodice of the flying woman, and the more he stitched, the less the tent leaked.

By spring the orchids had come up pink in the mud behind the ring, though nobody had planted them. The boy said they were a gift from his mother. Ottoline said the ground had simply remembered better years. The tiger, for the first time in a decade, put his head through the flap and roared at the morning as if it had insulted him, and the whole field woke up to hear it.