Colour floral vine tattoo across a bare back, with red and orange mandala-style flowers, black swirling stems and green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral vine tattoo across a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of the back, showing mandala-style flowers in red, orange and pink with fine black outlines and dotted detailing. A dark swirling vine runs diagonally through the design, with small green leaves and curling tendrils. The bright inked flowers stand out against the plain skin, and the head and hips are cropped out of the frame.

Botanical Back Flower Mandala Vine Leaf Swirl Floral

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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 sea had taken the lower garden wall twice that winter, so when the carrier's cart came up Scarrow Lane with a crate marked FRAGILE in red ink, Mrs Anwen Pell told the boy to leave it by the scullery door and not to open it. He opened it anyway. Inside, packed in wet sawdust, was a root the length of a forearm, black and knotted, with a single green leaf still clinging to its crown.

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Nobody in Scarrow knew what it was. Old Tegan from the chandler's said it was a sea-bramble that had lost its way from the islands, and the fishwives said it was bad luck to plant anything that had come by sea. Anwen planted it anyway, at the foot of the north wall where the salt wind could not reach it, and she watered it from the rain butt every evening while the lodgers sat out their holidays.

By midsummer it had climbed the drainpipe, then the sill of the attic window, then the ironwork of the balcony, sending out curling tendrils that opened into flowers as wide as dinner plates. They were red and orange and the pink of boiled prawns, each one ringed with fine black lace and dotted with seed-points like a sampler. The lodgers stopped complaining about the damp. A retired schoolmaster drew them every morning in a notebook, and when the fog came in each afternoon the flowers glowed through it like lamps.

In August a storm tore the slates off the east wing, and water came through the ceiling of room four. Anwen went up with a bucket and found the vine had wound itself around the joists, holding them together like stitching. She never pulled it out. The room still smells faintly of salt and rain, and the guests who sleep there say they dream of nothing at all.