Colourful folk-style floral tattoo across the lower back, with pink and purple flowers, a brown stem, green leaves and a small bird.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Folk floral tattoo on lower back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A brown stem rises from a patch of green ground, with pink and purple flowers, green leaves, a cluster of purple berries and a small red and pink bird at its base. The outlines are dark and even, and the fills are flat and solid, giving an embroidered, folk-art look. The design spreads across the lower back, with the waistband of jeans visible along the bottom edge.

Botanical Back Flower Bird Stem Leaf Bud Berry Vine

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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 rain came sideways across the car park at Mill Street market at half past seven, and I had the awning poles lashed and the tablecloths folded under my arm when the Pritchard boy ran up asking if I had anything left in blue. I didn't. I had a crate of linen napkins, a tin of crewel wool gone soft at the corners, and my mother's pattern book, the one with a water stain shaped like Wales.

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Mam stitched a stem like that on everything. Brown thread, a column rising from a patch of green ground, flowers opening off it in pinks and purples, a bird pecking at the base where the hem always frayed. She said the women who stitched dowry linen in the valleys never drew anything first. They counted threads and trusted the hand. I used to think that was showing off. Now I think it was the only honest thing about her.

The Pritchard boy's gran bought the last cushion, the one with the red bird, and paid in coins that clinked like a till from the old days. She held it against her coat and said it looked like something you'd find at the bottom of a drawer in a house that had been shut up for years. I told her that was the nicest thing anyone had said about my work all month.

By nine the rain had eased to a drizzle and I packed the book into its tin. On the lid, under a thumbprint of dried glue, Mam had written the name of every bird she'd ever sewn, in pencil, because she never trusted ink to last. The last entry was the bird at the base of the stem. I added nothing to it. I just closed the lid and let the wet pavement hold the last of the stall lights.