Black and grey magnolia flower tattoo with dotwork-shaded geometric shapes on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Magnolia and geometric shapes on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large magnolia bbloom with several outlined petals and a thin stem sits above overlapping hexagonal shapes. The flowers are rendered in clean black outline with fine line detail, while the geometric forms are filled with stippled dotwork shading that fades toward the edges. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a forearm, photographed close up against a pale wall and a dark chair.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Forearm Magnolia Flower Petal Leaf Stem Hexagon Geometric shape

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

Mrs Dorcas Penhale had cooked for the coasting barque Mariel for nineteen years, and in all that time she never let a man into the galley without a task. Whoever came in hungry peeled, scraped or fetched water from the butt on the forecastle. The boy Tobias arrived in February with frost on his collar and nothing else, so she set him shelling beans beside the stove.

Keep reading

He was a quiet lad who counted everything. He counted the spice tins on the shelf, six to a rack, hexagonal and dull with age, and asked why they were not round like sensible jars. "Round things roll in a swell," she said, and he thought about that for a week. On the fourth night off the Scillies a magnolia branch came aboard tangled in the rigging net, pale and bruised from a Falmouth wharf, its blooms already browning at the rims. Tobias carried it below in both arms as if it were a sick child.

Dorcas stood it in a stoneware jug and told him magnolias flower before they trouble with leaves, and that they hold their petals stiff so the cold cannot bruise them. She showed him how to sketch one on the back of a bill of lading, then how to dot the shadows with a nib so the edges faded into the dark. He drew all night while the stove ticked down.

By the time they reached Bristol the branch had dropped every petal, and Tobias had filled three pages. Dorcas took the drawings ashore with her wages and left him the jug. The next morning he came into the galley to find the six tins restacked into a honeycomb on the shelf, every one turned to face the wall, and she never asked him why.