Side-by-side photo of a botanical floral tattoo across a shoulder and upper arm, shown as a black linework outline on the left and shaded black and grey on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral shoulder piece before and after shading

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The image is a two-panel comparison of a floral tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm. The left panel shows the design as bold black outline work with no shading, while the right panel shows the same flowers with soft grey shading and dark accents on the petals and leaves. The composition is cropped below the chin and above the waist, with the arm and shoulder filling most of each frame.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Leaves Floral Daisy

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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

Pen, Joan, not pencil. You told me last week the lines looked finished enough to leave alone, and I said nothing, because I wanted you to see what happens next. Mr Ferris brought the proof sheet round on Tuesday, the one he'd had pinned in the window of the seed merchant on Mill Lane since March. Somebody had asked him to copy the old dahlia and daisy border from the back of the Whitcombe catalogue, and he'd outlined the whole run of it in that hard black ink, every petal a clean edge, every leaf a sharp little boat. It looked like a drawing of a garden in winter, all frame and no weather.

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Then he came back to it with the grey wash, a bit at a time, the way I taught him. Shadow under the lower petals so they lift off the page. A darker thumb of tone where the leaves fold over each other. He left the daisies almost bare in the middle, which I told him was the cleverest thing on the whole sheet, because a daisy is mostly light. By the end the flowers were sitting in the paper as if they had weight and a cold morning on them.

I keep thinking how little changed. The same lines, the same flowers, nothing added that wasn't already drawn. Only the shadows made the garden go somewhere. So when you next ink a border, don't ask whether it's done. Ask where the light falls, and what it leaves alone.

Your loving teacher, Edith