Colour botanical tattoo of blossoms and leaves across a woman's back and side, with a swallow on the shoulder and small script near the waist.

Floral back piece with swallow and script

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large floral design of white, pink, purple and turquoise flowers with green foliage and trailing stems covers the back and flank. A swallow sits at the top left near the shoulder, and a line of small script runs along the lower edge of the design. The soft, painterly shading sits on bare skin in a plain light setting, with the subject's back and arm turned toward the camera.

Botanical Realism Back Ribs Shoulder Flower Blossom Leaves Vine Swallow Bird Script

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 rain came to the Mojave two years after the drought had cracked the ground into plates, and by the third morning the verges had turned the colour of a bruise that was healing. My uncle Tobias drove the seed van with his elbow out of the window and an unlit cigarette he never bothered to finish. We were collecting for a nursery in Norfolk that paid by the packet, and nobody had told the desert it was supposed to be dead.

Keep reading

A swallow had been riding the thermals above us since Barstow, dropping lower each time we stopped. Tobias said they followed rain the way sailors follow gulls. I thought it was only hungry. Where the road bent past a dry wash, poppies had come up overnight, white and yellow and a pink so thin it looked wet, and a line of blue-flowered vines was climbing a fence post as if it had somewhere to be.

We filled sixteen envelopes that afternoon. Tobias wrote the names in capitals, and when he reached the last one he stopped and held it out to me. The label said only DO NOT SOW UNTIL THE RAIN IS SURE. I asked how anyone could know that. He nodded at the swallow, which had landed on the roof rack and was watching us with its head on one side.

We never sowed it. We drove that envelope back to Norfolk in the glovebox, and the swallow followed us as far as the Nevada line, then wheeled away toward the wash. I still have the packet. Tobias used to say some seeds keep for years, so long as somebody remembers where they were put.