Woman seen from behind in a car with black linework floral and paisley tattoos across her back and down her side, and tattooed upper arm.

Floral back tattoo seen from behind in a car

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with dark blue hair sits in a car with her back to the camera, wearing a black lace top. Her back is covered in black linework tattoos of flowers, scrolls and paisley-style motifs, with a larger floral design on her lower back and side. The image uses a soft, grainy film look with cool blue and green tones from the car interior and foliage outside.

Botanical Back Upper arm Flower Mandala Paisley Floral Scroll Car

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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

Take the lantern, child, and mind the third flagstone, for it has been sinking since your great-grandmother's day, and the roots beneath it have been listening ever since. You want the old story of the Greaves garden? Then sit close to the stove and I will tell it the way it was told to me.

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The garden behind Greaves Farm was walled in river stone, and nothing grew there unless it had first been drawn. Every bloom had to be inked onto the gatepost before the earth would take it: lilies, peonies, and the spiralling vine that curled round the iron latch, each put down in black by a hand that knew its true shape. Hester Greaves kept the ink and kept the rule. A flower drawn with a lie in the hand would wither before its petals opened.

Her nephew Tobiah was quick with his fingers and slow with his patience. One autumn he drew a great peony across the wall in a single sweep, never looking at the page, and told his aunt he had seen it in a dream. The lines were fine. The petals spread, dark and perfect, and for a week the village came to admire them. But on the seventh morning every bloom on the wall had curled inward like a closed fist, and the vine at the latch had gone grey as ash.

Tobiah sat in the mud all day with one pen, copying the single poppy he had truly watched open at the hedge, one petal at a time, until his hand cramped and his aunt brought him bread without a word. When he finished, the poppy was no bigger than a thumbprint. The next dawn the wall was green again, and the vine had wound itself a finger's width higher toward the sky.

If you go there tonight you will find the gatepost still faintly warm, and on it a small red smudge where a boy pressed his thumb to show he meant it. Now up you get. The frost is coming, and the wall is listening.