Colour botanical tattoo of a dahlia, poppy and pink blossom with lavender sprigs and green leaves across a woman's shoulder and upper back.

Dahlia and poppy flowers on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A realistic colour tattoo of a large orange dahlia at the centre, with a pink poppy above and pale pink blossoms with a small sprig of lavender below. Green leaves sit at the edges of the arrangement. Soft shading and fine petal detail give the flowers depth, and the design wraps over the shoulder blade towards the upper back.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Dahlia Poppy Flower Rose Lavender Leaves Blossom

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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

Sit closer, you with the wet boots, and mind the brazier. No, the other story is for another night. This one begins with Hesper, who sold flowers at the lower gate of Miletos, where the wind came off the sea and knocked her stall flat every third day of the month.

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She kept one rule for her basket. Whatever bloom a customer asked for, she first asked what it was for. A wedding wanted white violets. A man who came with a torn cloak and no coins wanted only a sprig of the grey lavender that grows on the rocks above the salt pans, and she gave it to him for nothing, because lavender keeps moths out of wool and sorrow out of a house, or so her mother said, and her mother was right about anything that could be smelled.

One autumn a stranger came asking for a flower nobody in Miletos had seen. He had carried a single tuber across the mountains in a clay pot wrapped in his own shirt, and he said it would bloom as big as a shield and as orange as a cooking fire. Hesper told him it would never survive the salt air. He said it would, if she planted a poppy beside it and set the blush-pink wild roses in the shade, so the wind would have to get past three kinds of stubbornness before it reached the heart of the thing.

The dahlia took. By midwinter the whole gate was ablaze with it, and the old women stopped grumbling about her prices. The stranger never came back for his pot. Each year Hesper pressed one bloom between two roof tiles and put it on the shelf above her door. When the children asked why she kept dead flowers, she told them some things only become worth having once they have been kept, and then she sent them off to fetch the wine.