Black and grey ornate floral tattoo with stippled shading covering a person's upper back, from the nape of the neck to between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate floral tattoo across upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical ornamental design of stylised flowers, leaves and paisley-like shapes sits on the upper back and extends up towards the nape of the neck. The linework is fine and the shading is built from dense dots and stipple, giving the leaves and petals depth. The image is black and white, and the design is centred in the frame with the back of the head and shoulders visible around it.

Botanical Dotwork Back Flower Leaf Paisley Mandala Ornament

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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 wind up here takes half of what I say and gives back the wrong half. You want the pattern, not the weather. My grandmother's grandmother walked this pass every autumn with a sack of wool on her back and a shawl folded over her arm, and on the shawl was a pattern nobody in the valley had seen before: a flower standing on its stem, leaves turning outward from it like a hand opening, and at its heart a shape like a teardrop split down the middle and made to face itself.

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She sold the shawl at the fair in Llanfair to a tinker's widow who could not pay, so the widow paid in dots. That was the trade, you understand. Every leaf in that border was pricked in with a bone needle, one dot at a time, until the cloth looked grey from a distance and silver up close. The widow's daughter never learned to weave, but she learned to prick, and she worked that flower into the corners of every sheep-dog's collar and every cradle hood in three villages.

Here is the turn. When the daughter was old, a surveyor came up the pass with a theodolite and a rain-soaked notebook and asked her what the pattern meant. She told him it meant the pass was where things were handed over. He wrote it down wrong, and that is why the road is still called Y Ddeilen, the leaf, on the maps and nowhere else.

Now go on down before the light goes. The dogs will be waiting, and you have a long way to walk with a pattern in your head that you cannot put down.