Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an ornate floral heart and dotted chain drapes across a woman's upper back and nape, photographed from behind.

Ornamental floral back piece with dotted chains

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose bun is photographed from behind, showing a large symmetrical tattoo across her upper back that starts at the nape. The design combines a central heart-like motif with scrolling foliage, flower heads, a fan-shaped top and a lace-like border, with strings of dotted chains hanging below. The work is rendered in fine dots and shaded linework in black and grey, against a plain light background.

Dotwork Botanical Back Heart Floral Scroll Flower Dotted chain Ornament Mandala Lace Shell Foliage

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

The jet fringe came off the frame in the wrong order, so on the Thursday before the Palais reopened I sat at the kitchen table with a seam ripper and undid three evenings of work. Dad's old tin of bugle beads rattled every time the kettle boiled. Mum said to leave it until morning, but the bodice had to be on Ivy Marsh by eight, and Ivy did not like to be kept waiting for anything, least of all a hem.

Keep reading

The pattern had come from a ceiling. Dad had cast the plaster rose over the stage himself in 1931: a heart pressed between two scrolls, a fan of shell at the crown, leaves spilling outward as if someone had tipped a jug of cream. Each spring he chalked it onto the paper I laid out for him, and I learned to trace it by lamplight in the back of the shop before I could properly read. The dotted chains were my idea. Dad said they looked like rain caught on wire, then said nothing more, which from him was praise.

Ivy tried it on in the back room with the gas fire ticking. She turned slowly, arms out, and the chains swung and settled like a curtain after a draught. "You've set the heart lower than the plaster," she said. "It's better lower." I didn't tell her I had moved it on purpose, so that when the skirt flared the whole thing would fall like a lowered veil.

That night I stood in the cloakroom doorway while the band played Moonlight Serenade and watched her cross the floor. Every step set the jet swinging, and the beads made a fine dry clicking I could hear over the saxophones. Dad, who had not danced since the war, tapped his thumb against the coat-hook beside me in time with it. It was the first thing I had ever made that moved.