Pencil drawing of a hibiscus flower with shaded leaves and a small frog on a white background, drawn as a possible tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Hibiscus flower with leaves and a frog

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a hibiscus bloom with a prominent central stamen, shown with layered petals and veining. Several shaded leaves and a small frog sit at the lower left of the flower. The work uses soft graphite shading in grey tones on a plain white background.

Botanical Realism Hibiscus Flower Leaf Frog Stamen 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

Brother Anselm had told you the hibiscus would not forgive a clumsy hand, so you knelt by the south wall with the lead stub between your teeth and waited for the bloom to make up its mind. Frost still lay in the cloister shadows. The bush had arrived in a crate from Lisbon with a label nobody could read, and it had sulked all winter in the cold frame until the bell for Lauds began to sound like something it could trust.

Keep reading

By the third morning a small frog had claimed the lowest leaf, pale-bellied and unbothered, and it watched you with the patience of a man who has outlived three abbots. You drew it first, because the frog would not move and the petals would. Its toes spread like the ribs of a fan. The hibiscus opened only after the sun cleared the bell tower, its petals folding back like tired hands, and the stamen rose from the middle with a crown of pollen so fine it looked like frost that had refused to melt.

Brother Anselm found you at vespers with the ledger open on your knee and the page gone grey with shading. He did not scold. He looked for a long time at the veins on the petals, then at the frog, then at you. 'You have given the leaves a shadow they do not need,' he said, and reached past you to lift the frog off the leaf with two careful fingers, setting it on the wet stone where the light would not catch it.

That night the bloom closed for good, as hibiscus do when they are done, and by morning the petals lay in the bed like paper cut from an old missal. You kept the page. Some mornings you still hold it to the window and find the frog exactly where Anselm put it, half in the shade and half out, waiting for someone to decide which one he belongs to.