Black ink ornamental tattoo of stylised flowers and scrolls centred on the upper back, with the wearer's face not shown.

Floral ornamental tattoo across upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper back carries a symmetrical ornamental design of two stacked flowers with curling scrolls, paisley-like swirls and dotted accents. The linework is solid black with fine detail in the petals and leaves, and the design is shown in black ink only against lightly tanned skin. The tattoo is centred on the spine and fills the space between the shoulder blades, with the hair and a floral-print top framing the image.

Botanical Back Flower Scroll Ornament Paisley Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had come down the valley before the ewes were brought in, and by Candlemas the kitchen window at Harrow's Fold was furred so thick that nobody could see the yard. Old Ada Harrow scratched a pattern into it each morning with the bone handle of a bread knife, because her hands needed something to do, and because her son had gone south to the mill towns and had not written since Martinmas.

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The pattern was always the same. Two flowers stood one above the other, each with five petals and a round eye at its heart. Scrolls curled out from either side like bracken uncurling in May, and small dots ran along their edges where the seed would fall. Her granddaughter Nell, who was nine and could not sit still, asked why the flowers were never different sizes. Ada said the upper one was for the child who stayed and the lower one for the child who went, and that the scrolls were the roads between them. Nell pressed her palm to the glass, the frost melted under her warmth, and the outline of a petal showed black against the white before the cold crept back into it.

On the last night of January the snow reached the sills and the lamp guttered without wind. Nell took the knife from the table and cut a third flower on the glass, a mirror of the second, with scrolls that ran off the edge of the pane. In the morning the lane was open, and a man with a pack on his back was coming up through the drifts, stopping every few steps to look at the house.

Ada did not wipe the glass. She left the three flowers there until the thaw, and by April the window was clear, but the marks had bitten into the wood of the sill, two flowers stacked and a smaller one beside them, where Nell's knife had gone deeper than the frost ever could.