Colourful iris tattoo with pink, purple and yellow petals and teal leaves, with dotted chain lines hanging beneath it, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Iris with dotted chains on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large iris flower is tattooed on the upper back, with pink and purple petals shading into yellow at the centre and a few teal leaves curling out above it. Fine dark outlines define the petals, and soft gradient shading gives them a luminous, layered look. Strings of small dots hang in loops beneath the flower, and the composition is centred on the shoulder blade area.

Botanical Dotwork Neo-trad Back Iris Flower Leaves Dotted chain Petal

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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's only good for one more verse. You want to know why the irises of Caddenmoor glow yellow at the throat? Hush, I'm getting to it.

Keep reading

King Aldric the Tall had the river walls of his kingdom planted with irises purple as a bruise, and he ordered every bloom that opened out of season cut and carried up to his tower, where he could look at them through the glass. His daughter Ysolde, who kept the bees, carried the cuttings down to the water instead, one at a time, in a basket lined with wet moss.

Each night the river took them back, and each morning they floated home again, strung with dew that hung from the stems in little loops and never dried, not even in the noon sun. The lamplighters swore to it. By midsummer the king's tower stood bare and cold, and he came down to the water himself, boots and all, to learn who had been robbing him.

He found Ysolde waist-deep in the reeds, singing to the flowers, and the flowers were opening in the current as if it were their own dawn. He could not cut what the river had already claimed. He knelt in the mud, and the iris held its colour and gave him a single dark dot of light from its heart. So the next time you see one, look at its throat. That's where the sun went when a king tried to keep it.