Black and grey botanical bouquet tattoo on a woman's upper back, shown as a temporary transfer alongside steps for printing, cutting and applying it.

Botanical bouquet temporary tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A collage of four photographs showing a floral design being printed onto transfer paper, cut out with scissors and applied to skin. The main image shows a bouquet of flowers with fine, soft shading and dark linework, sitting between the shoulder blades of a woman with her hair in a bun, above a dark lace top. The design is in black and grey ink against pale skin, with a dark teal background.

Botanical Back Flower Bouquet Temporary tattoo Scissors

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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

Mr Pardoe wanted the bouquet a third smaller, so on the Tuesday I sat under the north window with my glass and a cup of tea gone cold, bringing the peonies down until each petal was no wider than a fingernail. The copper had been cut in 1791 for an almanac nobody reads now, and the plate had worn so that the shading came out grey as weather. I printed twelve sheets on the iron hand press, then sponged each one with gum arabic so the lines would lift off clean when a lady pressed them down.

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Miss Hallam from the milliner's across the square came in on the Thursday. She wanted the transfers for a garden party and asked whether the ink would stay through a summer of dancing and a week of bathing. I told her no, that soap and sweat would have them off in a fortnight, and that the flower was built to be looked at, not kept. She took four sheets and paid in pennies, counting them twice onto my bench.

After she left I cut the stencils with the gold-handled scissors Pardoe kept for the lace patterns, snipping each stem from its leaves so the paper fell away in pieces like a broken fan. One whole bouquet was left on the bench, uncut, its peonies still pale where the wash had missed. I folded it once, then again, and slid it between the pages of the almanac.

The almanac is on my shelf now. Its peonies have never faded, and nobody has ever asked them to dance.