Brown henna-style floral and paisley design running down the middle of a person's back, placed along the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral paisley design down the spine

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A long, vertical design of flowers, leaves and paisley scrollwork runs down the centre of the back, with a larger bloom in the middle and smaller motifs above and below. The fine linework and dotted detail are dark brown on skin, with no colour ink, and the design is shown against a plain background with a draped fabric tied at the waist.

Botanical Back Flower Paisley Leaf Scrollwork Vine

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

Sit closer, the tea is still warm and the wind has not finished with us yet. You want the story of Ruksana and the dhow that would not turn back? Then listen. Her father ground henna leaves in a stone mortar on the quay at Mandvi every morning before the gulls woke, working the green paste with lime water until it was soft as bread dough. Nobody in that town could draw a flower the way Ruksana could, a fine cone of it pinched between two fingers.

Keep reading

When the Lantern Bride was loaded for Muscat, the captain's wife asked for a design nobody had seen before. Ruksana sat on a coil of rope through three days of calm and drew a long stem running down a length of cloth, a bloom at its heart, leaves curling off it like smoke, and paisley tails that looped back on themselves so the eye could never find their end. "It is a route," she told the captain's wife. "Follow it with your finger and you come home."

Then the storm came up out of the south-west and took the mainmast clean away. For nine days the crew bailed with their hands and sang the names of every port they had left behind. On the tenth morning the captain's wife unwrapped the cloth from her waist, held it up against the grey water, and the paste had faded just enough that the pattern showed as a pale road across the dark.

The captain swore the wind turned that very hour. Ruksana never said whether she believed him. She only said the Lantern Bride came home with the henna still on the cloth, and that every bride in Mandvi asked for the same road after that.