Two views of a large black linework floral ornamental tattoo covering a person's entire back, with chrysanthemum-like blooms and scrolling foliage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental floral back piece

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs show the back of a person with a large ornamental tattoo covering the full back, from the neck to below the waistline. The design is built from chrysanthemum-like blooms, lotus shapes and scrolling foliage arranged in a symmetrical column. It is rendered in solid black linework with fine outlines and little shading, and the skin is the only other colour in the frame.

Botanical Back Flower Chrysanthemum Lotus Foliage Ornamental Scroll Back piece

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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 officer at Kesh Bridge wanted to know what was rolled inside the cardboard tube, and you told him the truth: a pattern, drawn by a grandmother, of no use to anyone but the woman who needed it. He unrolled the first sheet on the bonnet of his jeep and weighted the corners with his cap and a tin of mints. Chrysanthemums the size of side plates, petal folded inside petal. Lotus heads stacked above scrolls of leaf, every line thin enough to lose in the morning glare.

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Auntie Lan had copied them from the lintel of a shrine in the valley before the reservoir went up, kneeling on a mat with a pricking wheel and a pot of charcoal dust. She had never once thought of the border as anything but a rumour. You had carried the lot up the hill in a rucksack that smelled of wet tarmac. "Is it a map?" the officer asked. "Of a way the water goes," you said, which was true enough. He laughed and stamped the form.

On the far bank you rolled the sheets back up and felt the weight was wrong. The bottom sheet, the one with the column's base and the great bloom that sat above the hips, was gone from the tube. You looked back, though you already knew where it had gone. The officer was still at his jeep, holding the sheet up to the sun the way you would hold a letter you meant to keep, and then he folded it into his breast pocket and waved you on.

You kept walking. That night in the hostel you pinned the top half of the column to the wall and began again from memory at the bottom: a lotus, then the chrysanthemum where the valley bends. You drew until the lamp gave out, and by morning the wall held one column that was half hers and half yours.