Black and grey tattoo of lily-style flowers, stars and swirls covering the upper arm and shoulder, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flowers and stars on upper arm and shoulder

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several flower blooms with outlined petals, five-pointed stars and curling swirl shapes arranged across the upper arm and shoulder. The flowers are drawn with crisp black outlines, while the stars and swirls are built up with soft grey shading that gives a sense of depth. The left photo is brighter and shows more of the skin tone, and the right photo is darker and shows the shading more clearly.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Flower Star Swirl

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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

Master Lucius never let me touch the blue. He said a girl's hand would make the sky look like dyed cloth, so for two summers I ground charcoal on the stone slab and mixed it into the lime wash, and that was the whole of my work. Grey, he said, is what the eye believes. Black lies flat on a wall. Grey remembers the light that used to be there.

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The silversmith on the Via dell'Abbondanza wanted a bedroom ceiling of stars for his wife, who could not sleep unless she believed she was out of doors. Lucius painted the flowers himself, oleander and a lily with petals drawn in hard black lines, because a bloom must have edges or it will not hold still on the plaster. He left the stars to me. I learned to press the brush into the corner of each point and lift it away, so the star looked like a shadow that had forgotten what it was shading.

Then the swirls. Wind, he called them, curling off the cornice like smoke from a dying lamp. I shaded them soft, dark at the spine and fading to nothing, and by the third week the ceiling seemed to turn slowly above our heads, as though the whole house were drifting out to sea.

On the last night, when the lamps had gone out, I climbed the scaffold alone and painted one star of my own at the very edge, where no client would ever look. I gave it no outline, only grey laid over grey. Lucius found it at dawn and said nothing, which from him was praise. Some things are better left unlit.