Back of a woman with blonde hair and a white lace top, showing a blue floral tattoo in a Delft-inspired style between the shoulder blades.

Blue floral tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A cluster of blue and navy flowers with dark leaves and scrolling foliage sits centrally across the upper back. The shading uses light and dark tones of blue with fine black outlines, giving the petals a layered, porcelain-like look. The tattoo is centred above a white lace top, with the subject's face and front not shown.

Botanical Back Flower Floral Leaves Foliage Peony

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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 oven door sticks at ten to five, the way it always does in February, and you put your shoulder to it while flour settles on the cold tiles. Mrs Okonedo's delivery van idles outside the back gate, its headlamps making two yellow coins on the wet cobbles. You have eleven minutes before the first loaves need turning.

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On the shelf above the proving drawers sits the blue-and-white plate your grandmother carried home from Delft in a tea chest, wrapped in a towel that smells of rye. Its peony lost a petal to a dropped whisk years ago, but the rest holds: a navy centre, paler lobes, leaves like dark brushstrokes that someone painted in a hurry and got exactly right. Every dawn you promise yourself it will be re-glazed. Every dawn the bread is more urgent.

Tonight the bell over the shop door rings early. A man in a coat too thin for the weather asks if you have anything left from yesterday. You don't, not really, but you pull a heel of seeded loaf from the rack and wrap it in paper. On his way out he glances at the plate, the way people do, as if the flowers might open if he looks long enough.

When the sky over the chimneys turns the colour of skimmed milk, you lift the plate down and buff it with a clean cloth. The blue comes up under your thumb as though it has been waiting. You set it back on its shelf, slide the first tray into the window, and let the light find the flowers before anyone else does.