Black and grey botanical tattoo of daisy-like flowers with buds and leaves, running from the shoulder down the upper arm.

Botanical flowers across shoulder and upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several daisy-like flowers with long petals, round centres and stems, plus smaller buds and leaves. The linework is dark and uniform, with light grey shading and a faint pale pink wash in some petals. The composition starts with a large bloom on the top of the shoulder, with smaller buds trailing across the collarbone, and continues in a diagonal sleeve down the upper arm.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Daisy Bud Leaf Stem Sleeve

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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

You find the seeds in a tobacco tin wedged under the stern thwart, rattling each time the boat lifts over the swell off Skerra Mor. Your uncle Eamon never labelled anything, so you guess from the dry heads, their petals long and pale as fingers, that they came from the walled garden at the old keeper's cottage. The keeper's wife grew them for the bees, he once told you, and then the bees stopped coming and so did the keeper's wife.

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The island has eleven houses left and one shop, shut on Tuesdays and Sundays and most other days besides. You walk the cliff path with the tin in your coat pocket, past the fence where the sheep lean through the wire, and you press a pinch of seed into every gap in the stone wall. The ground up there is thin and wind-scoured, the sort of place nothing should grow, and you say so out loud to nobody in particular. A gull answers, which feels like agreement.

By June the first bloom opens at the keeper's gate, round-centred and dark-stemmed, its petals pulled outward as if someone wanted more light inside. Then another further along the wall, then one above the slipway, then a whole row where the sheep have given up trying. Eamon's boat comes in on the Thursday tide and he stands on the quay looking up at the yellow edges of the cliff. He does not ask where you got them. He only takes off his cap and holds it against his chest, the way men here do when the ferry leaves without them.

Next spring you will bring a second tin.