Black and grey botanical tattoo of a stylised flower on a long stem running down the centre of a back, with dotwork shading.

Botanical stem down the spine

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised flower with layered leaves sits at the top of a long, thin black stem that runs down the centre of the back along the spine. Fine black outlines define the petals and small leaves, while the surrounding areas are filled with dense dotwork and mesh-like stippling that fades toward the edges. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and is framed by bare skin, with a white cloth visible at the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Fine line Back Flower Stem Leaves Bud Dotwork Spine

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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

By the third week out of Falmouth the lily had gone to seed in the one pot you'd carried aboard inside your coat, and Mr Fenwick, the purser, wanted it thrown over the side with the rest of the rubbish. You told him it was a bulb from a garden in Kent and would flower again once the ship picked up the trade winds. He laughed and said he'd believe it when he saw it.

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You kept it on the sill of the chart room, where the morning light came through the porthole in a long thin line. Each day you counted the leaves. There were five, then six, and on a grey afternoon off the Bay of Biscay a bud split at the top like a fist opening. You sketched it on the back of a cargo manifest, its petals layered like roof slates, its stem a single pencil stroke you could not keep straight in the swell. Behind the flower you shaded the sea in small dots, one by one, because hatching slid about whenever the floor pitched.

When the bloom finally opened, the whole mess deck crowded the hatch to look. Fenwick said nothing at all. He only took off his cap, which for a purser was a great deal.

Years later the drawing was still folded in your wallet, soft as cloth, the dots fading at its edges where the damp had got in. The stem ran straight down the page the way it always had, and you never did say which of you had grown it.