Black fine line and dotwork tattoo of a botanical sprig with leaves and bell-shaped flowers curling into a spiral, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Botanical spiral sprig across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a sprig of leaves, bell-shaped blossoms and small five-petalled flowers trails from the left into a large open spiral outlined in thin single lines. Dotted lines and scattered dots follow the curve of the spiral, with a few tiny dots drifting off to the left. The linework is fine and even, with the greys coming from soft shading on the skin and the photograph itself, set against pale skin in a close, slightly angled view.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Back Spiral Flower Leaves Sprig Dot Swirl Petal

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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 seed head had already split by the time you reached the wall, its papery cups rattling in the wind off the estuary. Your grandmother always said bellflowers were the last to give up their seed, that they hung on out of spite, and you believed her until you were nine and found the first one yourself, a dusty speck the size of a comma in the crease of your palm.

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Mr Pascoe, who kept the glasshouses at Carnhallow, had no patience for sentiment. He handed you a folded paper envelope and a pencil stub and told you to draw what you wanted to keep. So you drew the way the stem bent over, how the blossoms hung like small bells above the leaves, and then you drew the curl at the end, tight as a fiddlehead, and you kept going, round and round, until the spiral reached the edge of the paper and the dots began to wander off the line.

Those dots were the seeds. He laughed when you explained it and said you were drawing the wind more than the plant. Maybe so. By August the wall was full of volunteers, and the little five-petalled flowers you had sketched were growing exactly where you had scattered them, lifting pale heads to the sun.

You kept the envelope tucked in the back of your atlas for years. Last winter you opened it again. The pencil had gone grey with handling, the spiral was faint, and the dots still ran off towards the margin, and you found you could follow the whole curve with one finger without lifting it.