Black and grey fine line and dotwork sprig of leaves and flower clusters tattooed on a person's upper back, shown from behind.

Botanical sprig tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A slender branch with small fine line leaves rises diagonally from the lower left, topped by clusters of flowers built from stippled dots that fade lighter toward the top. The linework is delicate and even, and the shading is achieved with dotwork rather than solid fill. The tattoo is in black ink and greys, set against bare skin beside a red, black and blue patterned tank top.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Back Sprig Branch Leaves Flower Foliage

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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 van smells of diesel and cut stems at half past two, and you are the only one awake on the wholesale road in Nine Elms. Someone has left a bucket of elder beside the loading door, its cream heads gone brown at the edges, and you pick out a single branch to see whether it is worth saving. Up close each flower is a crowd of tiny dots, thick at the base and thinning toward the tips, as if the light gave out before the petals did.

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You ride the night bus back over the river with the branch wrapped in a damp page of yesterday's paper on your knee. The windows are black mirrors, and you watch yourself watching the lit shopfronts slide past: a kebab shop shutting, a man asleep under a bus shelter, one lamp on in a block of flats in Walworth. At home you fill a jam jar from the tap and stand the stem in it on the sill, where it can see the streetlights.

Mrs Okafor from downstairs knocks at four, still in her dressing gown, because the light is on. She takes one look at the elder and tells you the water must be changed every night or the flowers will sulk and drop. So you do. You get up before the milk float each morning, tip the jar, rinse the stem and set it back in fresh water, and on the ninth night you notice the first pale threads of roots pushing out of the cut end like hair.

By the end of the month the top clusters have faded so far they are nearly all dot and no flower, dissolving into the grey sky over the estate. You leave the jar where it is. It is the only thing in the flat still growing.