Back tattoo covering the upper and mid back in a traditional style, with floral and ornamental designs and script across the lower back.

Full back piece with script across the lower back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A person seen from behind, sitting on a floor in a room with a window and a record player beside them. A large back piece covers most of the back, with floral and ornamental motifs, a central figure and scripted words across the lower back. Bold black outlines carry red, green and yellow fills alongside grey shading.

Traditional Lettering Back Back piece Script Floral Ornament Rose

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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 closer, the fire will only last for one more log, and I have one tale left in my throat before it gives out. You want the one about the roses at Greywell. Everyone wants that one, though nobody ever asks what the carved words over the gate were meant to say.

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The castle has been roofless since the Lord Harrow went off to the wars and never came home. Nobody cared for the gardens after that, so the bramble swallowed the bailey and climbed the chapel wall. A gardener's boy called Tobin Marl was sent in each spring with shears and a bad temper. He cut back the thorns and found, under the moss on the lintel, a line of letters worn almost smooth: Tell the rose it was understood. He thought it a riddle and went on cutting.

Every spring the roses came back, red at the heart and yellow at the tips, as if they had been painted by someone in a hurry who cared very much. Tobin kept cutting. He grew old doing it. On the last morning of his working life he climbed the wall to clear the arch one final time and found the rose had pushed through the glassless window of the solar. Inside, on a table gone to dust, lay a single folded letter, its seal still bright. He read it aloud to the empty room, the way you would read to someone who could not see.

It was only a few lines, and they were not about war. They said the lady had waited at the window every evening and that she forgave him for leaving. Tobin walked home without his shears, and the roses at Greywell have grown wild ever since, as if they are still answering it.