Red pencil sketch of a botanical tattoo design with layered flowers, leaves and swirls running down the side of a back and hip outline.

Floral back design sketch in red pencil

Botanical · Back · Colour · Flash

A red pencil drawing on a spiral sketchbook page shows outlines of a torso and hips with a floral design running down the side. The design features several layered flowers with pointed petals, leaves and curling stems. The lines are loose and sketchy with some soft shading near the petals, and the drawing is entirely in red on white paper.

Botanical Back Flower Leaves Swirl Stem

Find an artist for this

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 vine came up the valley road in the third week of the dry season, and nobody in Harrow Cote could say who had planted it. Old Mab Tennant said it had grown from the red chalk the widow Ysolde dropped on her threshold the night of the flood, and the children believed her because the chalk marks ran straight from the well to the millhouse door.

Keep reading

Ysolde kept a sketchbook bound with cord, and every evening she drew the blooms she had seen that day: a flower with petals as sharp as spear points, a curl of stem that turned back on itself like a question. When the baker's boy asked what they were for, she said the flowers wanted somewhere to go, and that a drawn thing only waited for a hand willing to carry it.

In spring the vine reached the miller's wall, then the orchard gate, then the bridge. Its flowers opened in layers, one over another, and where they touched the ground the stems coiled tight and rooted. The miller's wife cut at it with a sickle and found the sap running red as chalk dust, and she stopped.

Ysolde walked the road to the bridge with the sketchbook under her arm and found the last bud open above the river. She did not draw it. She sat beside it until the water took the light, and in the morning the page was empty except for one red line running off its edge, which the village still follows to this day.