Black outline tattoo of flowers, swirls and a geometric city skyline across a shoulder and upper arm, with red shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flowers, swirls and a city skyline on upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm of a person in a sleeveless top, showing stylised flowers on a long stem, a curling swirl motif near the shoulder and a block-built city skyline above wave-like hatching. The work is mostly bold black outline with some solid black fill in the lower pattern, and orange-red wash runs along the stem and behind the skyline. The composition wraps around the arm, with the flowers rising from the lower arm toward the shoulder.

Botanical Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Flower Stem Swirl Leaf City skyline Building Wave Geometric pattern

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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

Sit down, sit down, and mind the cat, she's older than this bench and twice as sour. The town was called Harrowgate Bay, though the sea had left it long before anyone's grandfather was born, leaving only a wall and the gulls who still argued about it. The builders came after that with their grey blocks stacked like unsold bread, and they put a clock on every corner so nobody could be late for nothing.

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Among those blocks, one stem came up through a crack beside the tram depot. Nobody planted it. It grew tall as a lamp post, and at its top it opened a single flower, pale and wide as a saucer. The foreman sent a lad with a bucket of tar. The lad came back the next morning with the bucket still full and his hands shaking, and he said the stem had leaned towards him, the way a dog leans to a stranger it means to like.

So the council sent a surveyor, a thin man with a ledger and very clean boots. He measured the stem and wrote that it was a hazard to traffic. Then the wind came in off the water, the proper wind that makes the curls in the sky, and it bent that flower right over his head. It bent and bent until he had to hold his hat on with both hands and walk home with his mouth shut tight, which, I'm told, was the first sensible thing he did all year.

Here's the end of it, and then you can have your tea. The following spring, people started leaving things at the foot of that stem: a button, a ticket stub from the last circus that ever came to Harrowgate, a child's painted wave. The surveyor kept his ledger. If you ever get hold of it, turn to the back pages and you'll find a flower drawn in the margin, and beside it, in his neat hand, a single word: leave it.