Woman seen from behind with black floral scrollwork tattoos across her back and upper arms, hands clasped at her waist and rings on her fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral scrollwork tattoo across a woman's back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman stands with her back to the camera and her hands clasped low behind her, showing a large tattoo of leafy vines and scrolling foliage across her upper back and shoulders, with further scrollwork on her lower back. The linework is bold and the ink is dark grey to black, with soft shading that follows the contours of the skin. The plain grey wall behind her keeps the focus on the tattoo, and a silver necklace and rings add small highlights to the frame.

Botanical Back Forearm Foliage Scrollwork Vine Leaves Floral Ornament

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

Ada Pryce had bent the same leaf three times and it kept coming out flat. The forge in Attercliffe smelled of coal dust and wet sacking, and her father had already gone home, leaving the gate for Ranmoor on the bench with its iron vines half-coiled like sleeping snakes. The commission was for a conservatory on Hallam Road, and the client had been specific. She wanted foliage that looked as though it had grown there, not been hammered into shape.

Keep reading

She went out at dusk to the back wall of the works, where ivy had worked its way through the brick for thirty years and pulled the mortar apart in ribbons. Ada knelt in the cinders and traced the stems with a stub of chalk. The plant did not climb in straight lines. It wandered, doubled back, found a crack and followed it, and every leaf turned toward whatever light was left. She filled her coat pockets with chalk and went back inside before the lamps were lit.

On Thursday the client came in a grey coat and said nothing for a long while. She ran a gloved finger along the scroll, stopped at a curl that doubled back on itself, and asked who had drawn it. Ada told her the wall had. The woman laughed, a short surprised sound, and paid in full without haggling. At the door she asked for one leaf to be left unfinished, so the gate would always look as if it might still be growing.

Ada's father hung the gates that afternoon. The light through the glass caught the one bare tendril at the top, the metal still dull where she had stopped, and out past the yard the ivy went on climbing the works wall, following chalk marks nobody had bothered to wipe away.