Black and grey realism tattoo across a person's upper back showing lilies, a hummingbird, a skull and scrollwork.

Lilies, hummingbird and skull on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo covers much of the upper back, with a hummingbird in flight beside several lily blooms and a skull near the lower half. Scrolling swirls and leaves fill the gaps between the flowers and the skull. The shading is soft and detailed, with strong contrast on the petals and skull and smooth gradients across the skin.

Realism Botanical Back Lily Hummingbird Skull Flower Scrollwork Swirl Leaves

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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

The hummingbird was the first thing I saved from the old orchard beds, though Mother said it was foolish to spend a cold cell on a bird that wouldn't feed on anything we could grow. I kept it anyway in the dim of the hydro hall, where the lamps come on at six and go off at eighteen, and I learned its hours the way you learn a stranger's cough.

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The lilies came next, bulbs wrapped in wet paper and pressed into the grey loam of Tank Four. Nobody eats a lily. Dr Okonedo said that was the point, that a colony which grows something for no reason has decided to stay. I thought about that while I lifted the skull from the salvage crate, the one with the yellow tooth-stain and the cracked brow, which the surveyors left on Shelf Nine with a note reading 'memento, do not index'.

On the hundredth cycle the pumps coughed and the scrolls of root-vine I'd coaxed up the trellis went brown at the edges. I sat in the hall with the bird's humming in the speakers and the skull in my lap, doing the arithmetic every keeper dreads. Then the hummingbird lifted from its perch, hovered over the one lily still white, and dipped its beak in, as if the flower had been waiting for it.

I logged it as a pollination event, which is true, and left the skull where it was, grinning at the water pipes, because someone had to keep the lilies company while they learned to live on less from us.