Colourful folk-style floral tattoo of red tulips, purple and blue blooms and green leaves running diagonally across a person's upper back.

Folk floral tattoo across upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A vine of stylised flowers and leaves climbs diagonally from the lower left to the upper right of the back, with a large red tulip at its centre. The flowers are filled with solid, saturated colour and outlined with fine dark lines, and faint pale sketch lines show near the upper right shoulder. Vivid reds, oranges, purples, blues and greens stand out against the light skin, and the photo is taken from behind with the subject wearing a black top and the head cropped at the top of the frame.

Botanical Back Flower Tulip Leaves Blossom

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

You are told to stop fidgeting, because the thread will not wait for a bride who cannot keep still. Your aunt Zsófi has pinned the linen to the frame on the kitchen table, and the vine is already halfway across it: green stems, a row of blue buds, and at the centre a tulip she has been stitching since Easter, its petals packed so tight with red silk that they look wet. Outside, the cousins are shouting over a cart of straw, and somebody has already dropped a tray of glasses in the yard.

Keep reading

"Lower the chin," she says. "The flower follows the line of your neck, not the other way round." You do as you are told. Zsófi has never once let a pattern be copied by eye. Every bloom in the village has a meaning she claims to know, and she will not say what the tulip means until the needle is threaded through the last leaf. You ask twice. She bites off the thread and says nothing at all.

The ceremony is at noon. The shawl goes over your shoulders at a quarter to, still smelling of the blanket chest where it lived for forty years, and the stiff cotton settles as the vine winds from your collar down toward the hip. Zsófi tugs the knot, straightens a leaf with her thumb, and steps back with her hands on her hips the way your grandmother used to stand when a loaf came out right.

"There," she says. "Now the flowers can carry you across the yard without you having to look down." When the fiddler starts, you walk out into the sunlight with the red tulip turning in the light, and for the first time all morning, you do not feel the thread at all.