Colour floral tattoo with black lace-style roses and pink and teal washes across the side of a torso, shown in a three-panel collage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lace and floral tattoo across ribs and back

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the side of the torso and wraps toward the lower back, combining black lace-patterned roses and leaves with large pink and magenta flower forms. Soft teal and blue washes fill the spaces between the motifs. The linework is crisp and dark in the lace areas, while the coloured shapes are softer and blended, and the three photographs show different angles of the same piece.

Botanical Ribs Back Lace Flower Rose Lily Leaf Floral

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

The lacemaker of Holm Ferry had only black thread left after the winter the river came over the lock. She sat at her window on Eel Lane with a cushion of pins and turned out roses the way her mother had taught her, one leaf at a time, while the rest of the village queued at the dairy for ration books and talked about the new bus. Her garden behind the wall had always grown lilies. Nobody could remember them ever being pink.

Keep reading

In April they opened as wide as cupped hands, bruised magenta at the throat, and the grass beneath them turned teal where the lock water had dried. Albert Gough, who delivered the post on a bicycle with a wicker basket, stopped at her gate one morning and asked whether she knew what the colour was. She said it was the colour of what she had lost, and she had no use for it. He said the bus driver's wife kept a lace collar of hers folded in tissue paper, and that folk came asking for a rose to carry for someone they had buried.

So she made roses for anyone who asked, and each one she finished brought another lily up in the bed, and the colour bled further across the garden, over the wall and down the towpath. The last piece she made was a long trailing leaf for her own mother's grave. When she pinned it to the lock gate, the water below ran clear and blue for the first time in years. She left the lace there. Black on the wet wood, it still caught the morning light, and nobody took it down.