Back view of a woman with a botanical tattoo of roses and foliage across her upper back, while a cream satin dress is tied at her waist.

Floral back tattoo with cream satin dress

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

The photo shows the upper back of a woman with dense tattoos of roses, flowers and leaves spreading across the shoulders and down toward the middle of the back. The linework appears bold with shaded grey and black areas, and some red in the rose petals adds colour. The composition is a close crop from behind, with long wavy hair falling over the shoulders and two hands adjusting a cream satin sash at the waist.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Leaf Foliage Floral Hair

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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 cutting came up Gallow Wells Road in the footwell of my brother's Ford, wrapped in a wet tea towel and tucked against the heater, because Teodor had decided a dying plant was less trouble than another argument. Nothing grows out there without fussing, and I had no intention of fussing. I put it in a galvanised tub beside the pump, filled it with grey water from the well and told it that if it wanted to be a rose, it could earn its keep.

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It bloomed in the second week of June. Red, then darker, the petals curling like the edges of old letters. Truckers slowed down to look at it. Ada Moss, who ran the dressmaking shop in Tolliver with its single window full of headless mannequins, drove out with a bolt of cream satin under her arm and a request: a sash for her niece's wedding at the chapel by the crossroads, something that would hold a little of the desert in it.

I cut three stems the morning before the wedding and pressed them flat inside a phone directory overnight. Then I sewed the petals into the satin with thread the colour of dried blood, one stitch at a time, while the ceiling fan ticked and the radio gave the wind speed every ten minutes. Ada tied the sash on the day itself, her mouth full of pins, and said it was the only thing in the shop that didn't look borrowed.

The bush died in September, as they do when you leave them to the sun. I dug out the root and kept it in the tub anyway, just in case. What I think about now, when I drive past the chapel, is the knot at the back of that satin, and one red petal pressed flat against the cloth, still holding its shape long after the rest of the garden had gone to dust.