Pencil drawing of hibiscus and plumeria flowers with blue-tinted shading and dark swirls, a botanical tattoo design shown without any body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hibiscus and plumeria flower design with swirls

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing of two large hibiscus blooms and a plumeria flower, grouped together with a few leaves. The petals are shaded in graphite with soft grey gradients and blue highlights along the edges. Dark curling swirls frame the flowers on the left and right, and the plain white background leaves the design isolated.

Botanical Hibiscus Plumeria Flower Leaf Swirl Petal

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

Sit still, Tomas, and mind the twine, because I shall only tell this once and my knees are already making their own arrangements. You want to know why the blue runs along the petals like a tide mark? Forty years back the Mary Ellen came into Ramsgate with a hold of salt cod and, tucked in a crate of ice, three hibiscus blooms that a cook from the islands had pressed on my brother in exchange for a bottle of rum. Nobody wanted flowers that smelt of diesel and fish. My brother Dennis wore one behind his ear the whole week and sang Harbour Lights until the gulls gave up on him.

Keep reading

The plumeria came later, and that was my doing. I had a hand-drawn map of the banks taped inside the wheelhouse, and I drew the curling lines around it because the sea never runs straight and neither did Dennis. Every spring he swore he would take me to see the flowers growing on the real trees, and every spring the weather said otherwise. So I kept the blossoms in a biscuit tin, flattened and grey at the edges, and the tin sat on the sill of the net loft where the light came in sideways.

The night the Mary Ellen did not come back, the coastguard radioed at four and I walked the breakwater with a torch that had no battery left in it. Nobody told me what I wanted to hear, which was the kindest thing anyone did for me that week. At first light a boat with a blue stripe came round the Pegwell end, and Dennis stood at the rail with a hibiscus behind his ear, grinning like a fool.

He lived another nine years, long enough to see the tin go soft at the corners, and when they carried him up the hill he had a fresh flower tucked under the strap of his cap. Pass me the grey pencil, lad. The blue goes on last, always.