Black linework tattoo of flowers and scrolls on a woman's upper back, photographed from behind with her arms raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral scroll tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with green-streaked hair, seen from behind, wears a black backless top and a leopard print skirt. A black linework tattoo of flowers and swirling scrolls sits on her upper back, slightly right of the spine. The image is in full colour overall, with the tattoo itself in black ink on warm skin against a blue sky and trees.

Botanical Back Flower Scroll Floral ornament Swirl

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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

Mind the loose flag by the cistern, and sit where the moss is thin, because this is a long one and my knees have opinions. You want to know how the gardens of Hollin Reach came to be drawn on a person's back. It begins with a vault, and a vault begins with a rule, and the rule was Oyelaran's. Nothing green left the seed vault without a drawing to go with it, because the lamps down there ate colour, and a seed without its picture was just a dry bead nobody could name.

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So Tamsin Brace spent three winters copying. She sat under the lamps with a fine brush and copied the curl of a briar, the open face of a poppy, the spiralling tendrils of a climbing rose that had not seen rain since the first dome cracked. Her lines grew tight and black. Oyelaran would hold each sheet up to the grey light and say only, 'Again,' and Tamsin would go again, until one spring the lamps failed for nine days and the whole vault went cold.

When the wind-ships came to carry the seed north, there was no room for the crates and the reed baskets and the vellum sheets all at once. Dov, who had mended the lamps and knew the old inks, said the drawings could ride on skin, and nobody had an argument for that. So Tamsin lay on the cold bench with her back bared, and Dov worked the flowers in over her shoulder blade, scroll after scroll, slow enough that she counted the swallows crossing the dome roof above them.

By dusk the rose was on her, and when she stood she felt the vines pull a little whenever she breathed, the way the real ones had once leaned towards a window. The ships lifted without her, and Tamsin walked north with the garden on her back. Nobody has found the seed yet, but the scrolls still curl whenever someone in Hollin Reach takes a deep breath, and that is how we know it is still there.