Fine line origami crane tattoo with small coloured flowers and leaves on the upper back, near the nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Origami crane with small flowers on upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A black line drawing of an origami crane sits on the upper back, with a loose arc of small coloured flowers and leaves curving around its left side. The crane is drawn in thin, even outlines with no shading, while the florals are filled with red, orange, green and blue ink. The tattoo is centred on the skin with a plain grey top and soft natural light in the background.

Fine line Botanical Back Crane Flower Leaves 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

Sit close, you lot, the stove's still warm and I'm not telling this twice. My grandmother ran the lock at Brennan's Weir, and she had a habit of folding things. Bus tickets, the vicar's sermon notes, once a whole week of my grandfather's letters, which he'd written from the Tyne when he was supposed to be working. She folded them all into little birds, and she said a folded thing keeps its secrets better than a sealed one.

Keep reading

The winter he didn't come back up the river, she sat in the lock-house with a sheet of brown paper and folded a crane. It took her three nights. Every time her fingers slipped she swore in Welsh, which is the only good use for that language, I'm told. On the fourth morning she carried the bird down to the towpath, where the wild roses had gone over and the willowherb was turning to fluff, and she pressed flowers from the bank into the hollow of its wings. Red campion. Bluebell gone to seed. A blue speedwell no bigger than a button.

Here's the part that gets me. Next spring the crane was still in the lock-house window, and the flowers under its wings had faded to dust. But the boy from the next boat, a scrap of a thing called Tomas, swore he saw a line of fresh blooms come up along the water's edge in the exact curve of the bird's wing, and nowhere else.

So we always leave a bit of the bank unmown on the far side of the lock. Mind your feet going past. That's grandmother's crane, and she's still folding it.