Black ink tattoo of ornate flowers, paisley swirls and two hummingbirds across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral paisley and hummingbirds on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black ink tattoo covers the upper back and shoulder blade, showing two flowers with layered petals, paisley-like swirls and two hummingbirds in flight. The linework is fine and detailed, with dense hatching and dotted fills that give the motifs depth. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, and it curves diagonally from the shoulder down toward the spine.

Botanical Fine line Back Shoulder Flower Hummingbird Paisley Swirl Leaf Mandala

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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 rain has come in sideways across the field, and the paint on the caravan panel runs before you can finish the second flower. Dougie Marr comes hollering from the dodgems that the generator is spitting sparks again, and you tell him, without turning round, that the generator has been spitting sparks since Whitley Bay and it can wait until you've lifted the brush off the page.

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The panel belongs to Ada Strand's wagon, the one with the mangle and the cast-iron stove, and she wants paisley that looks poured from a jug. You have been painting those curls for six seasons, copying them from a shawl folded in the bottom of your trunk, the wool gone soft and the colours sunk to rust and plum. Ada wants birds too. You say hummingbirds, because you once saw one in a glasshouse in Edinburgh, hanging in the air as if someone had pinned it there, and you have never got over the feeling that it was too small and too busy to be real.

By dusk the rain has stopped and the stencil is peeling off the damp wood. You lift it slowly, the way your father taught you to lift a transfer, and the first bird is there, wings held in a blur of hatching, its beak aimed at the centre of the flower you copied from the shawl. Ada climbs the steps with her tea and says the birds look ready to leave. You tell her they are.

At six the next morning the convoy grinds past the hedge, and you watch from the verge as her wagon takes the bend with your flowers rolling by at walking pace. The stencil is folded in four in your coat pocket, and your rag is stained the colour of plums. Somewhere ahead on the Carlisle road there is a wagon full of paisley going the wrong way for a hummingbird, and you find you don't mind at all.