Black fine line botanical vine tattoo with leaves and flowers across a woman's upper back, shoulder and upper arm, shown from behind in a warm sepia photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral vine tattoo across a back and arm

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a large tattoo of curling vines, leaves and tulip-like flowers that runs diagonally across her upper back and over the shoulder onto the upper arm. The linework is fine and dark, with small swirls, dotted accents and light shading on the leaves. The photo has a warm sepia tone, and the composition is a loose, candid angle with the tattoo as the main focus.

Fine line Botanical Back Shoulder Upper arm Vine Flower Leaf Swirl Tulip

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

Sit yourself down, the kettle's only just gone off, and don't go touching the jar on the windowsill, that's Mrs Arkwright's bulbs and she'll have my hide if they sprout early. Now. You want the story of the vine, and you'll have it the way my father told it, which is the only honest way. The Crane Street sluice keeper had a wife called Ada who would not be told where to plant anything.

Keep reading

The winter the river came over the bank at Hallow Mill, Ada took a parcel off the carrier's cart addressed to nobody. It was a brown paper box with tulip bulbs packed in sawdust and a card that said only: for the one who keeps the water. Nobody ever learnt who sent them. She pushed them into the cold clay along the north wall, where nothing had grown in living memory, and told the sluice keeper, Tom Greaves, that if she was going to live beside a river she would live beside a garden as well.

By June the bulbs had come up red, and the vine came after them. It was a green thread that found the drainpipe, then the gutter, then the sill of the bedroom window, and then it was out along the brick in long curling arms with leaves like cupped hands. Tom cut it back twice. Twice it came back thicker, and he said the thing was sulking. Ada said it was climbing towards the light, which is what anything sensible does.

When Tom died in the flood year, the vine had reached the eaves and was throwing its little flowers out over the water. Ada went up the ladder with her shears and stood among the leaves for a long while. Then she came down, wiped her hands on her apron, and left it be. Bees were in the tulips by then, and the river went on past the sluice as if nothing had ever been planted there.