Fine line black and grey magnolia branch tattoo with two open flowers and buds across a person's lower abdomen and hip.

Magnolia branch across the hip

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A magnolia branch wraps across the lower abdomen and hip, with two open flowers, several closed buds and oval leaves on thin curving stems. The linework is fine and precise, with some stippled dotwork shading in the petals and leaves that gives them depth. The tattoo is in black and grey ink on pale skin, and the design runs diagonally across the frame beside a navel and a dark waistband.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Other Magnolia Flower Branch Bud Leaves Stem

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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 is only warm where you can feel it. You want the tale of the tree that would not wait? Then hear it the way my grandmother gave it to me, with the wind rattling the shutters.

Keep reading

In the river city of Ambral, where the barges carried salt up from the coast, there lived a potter named Teodra Vell. Her husband had planted a magnolia by the east wall before the sea took him, and every spring she climbed the stones to see whether it had woken. It was a stubborn thing. It put out its flowers before a single leaf, pale cups on bare grey wood, and the town said that a tree which blooms before it has leaves has forgotten how to be patient.

Teodra kept her opinions to herself. Each morning she carried up a cup of river water and talked to the branches about the price of clay, the harbourmaster's ugly hat, and the son who had gone south with the salt fleet and not written since the frost. The buds stayed closed. She kept coming anyway.

Then one spring the magnolia opened three buds at once, then a fourth, and the whole town gathered below to look, because a flower in the wrong season is a warning, everyone knows that. Teodra climbed the wall and counted them with one finger, not touching the petals.

That evening a thin young man came through the east gate with salt in his hair and a sailor's cough. He stopped under the branch and looked up at the open flowers. "You waited," he said. Teodra only smiled and said the tree had been impatient for him all winter, and she had simply been listening.