Woman in a grey racerback vest seen from behind in a mirror selfie, with colourful floral tattoos across her upper back and shoulder and a black ornamental piece at the nape.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral back and shoulder tattoos in a mirror selfie

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a grey racerback vest photographs herself in a mirror, showing a large tattoo across her upper back and shoulder. The main piece has green leaves and rose-like flowers in coloured shading, with a dark ornamental band at the top of the neckline. In the foreground on the left, a second shoulder and arm tattoo shows black linework and grey shading with yellow, green and pink accents in a mandala-like pattern.

Botanical Back Shoulder Upper arm Rose Leaves Flower Mandala Ornament Floral

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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 rose came aboard at Marrowby Lock in a terracotta pot lashed to the cabin roof, wrapped in wet sacking because the lock-keeper's widow swore it would not survive the cut otherwise. You cut the twine with a bread knife and a numb thumb, and the leaves unfurled in the grey light, dark and glossy as river weed in shade. The first bud was tight and stubborn, the kind that means to open whatever the weather decides.

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For three summers you water it from the cabin tap before the first lock of the day. Each evening the stems have crept further along the rail, as if the roof is a garden it means to claim. Walkers on the towpath stop to laugh at the pot. A boy from a hire boat asks whether it is poisonous, and you tell him only to people who are rude to it.

In the third winter you find the widow's logbook in the locker under the stove. Between the pages for toll money and tide times is a flattened bloom, brown at the edges, with a date in pencil and the words for Tom, who went down to the estuary and did not come back up. The rose was never a joke. It was a promise kept in a pot.

In April you take a cutting, wrap it in the same wet sacking, and tie it to the rail of the first boat heading upstream. Pinned under the twine is a note in your best hand: it likes shade, and it will forgive you for going slowly.