Collage of four photos showing a colourful floral tattoo with black swirling linework and gear motifs across a shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral swirls and gears across a shoulder and back

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows one large tattoo of swirling vines, pink flowers and small cogs across a shoulder blade and upper back, with a small dragonfly-like shape near the top. Fine black linework outlines the swirls, while soft pink, blue, orange and teal colour fills the flowers and leaves. The four photos are taken at different angles and show the tattoo from above, the side and below.

Botanical Fine line Shoulder Back Flower Swirl Gear Cog Vine Leaf Dragonfly

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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 clockmaker's daughter, Ilse, had been told that the mechanism in the high tower of Veldmoor would stop the day the last gear was set, and so she had spent eleven winters refusing to finish it. Every spring the old wheels ground a little slower, and every spring the town sent up a boy with bread and a complaint. She kept her bench by the window where the light came in green off the river, and she kept her tools in a row like a choir waiting to be dismissed.

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The spring the river rose, a stranger came up the tower stairs with a cloth bundle under one arm. He was a gardener, or said he was, and he unwrapped on her bench a bough of wild clematis, its stems so twisted they looked like written words. Between the leaves hung a few brass cogs he had found in a flooded cellar. He asked her to make them turn in the vines, and to let the flowers open pink where the sun struck them, and to leave the blue in the shadows where it belonged.

She worked for nine days. On the tenth she realised the vines had been pulling the gears along with them, and that the whole bough was the mechanism, slow and tangled and alive. She climbed the tower at dusk, set the last cog in place, and felt the great clock beneath her take a breath it had not taken in years. Below, the bell rang out over the water, and the river, which had been rising all week, slowly began to fall.