Colour tattoo of a large flower in pink, purple, blue and orange with soft, painted edges, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Painterly flower on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large flower with layered petals and an orange centre is tattooed on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. Dark linework is loose and broken in places, while the petals are filled with soft washes of pink, purple, blue and orange that fade into the skin. The subject is shown from behind on grass, with a black top in the lower frame and a small partial tattoo visible at the right edge.

Botanical Back Flower Petal Blossom

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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 guard has gone to find his stamp and he will be a long while about it. Shut your eyes if you like. I will tell you about the painter's daughter who came down from the hill villages with a box of pigments and no papers at all.

Keep reading

At the crossing in those years the river was the border and the bridge had a booth with a tin roof. Nobody crossed without a stamp, so she painted one. She mixed madder with the blue from a broken lamp, and when the water in her jar ran dry she used the rain off the roof. Every flower she made she set on the wet stone of the parapet, and the flowers bled into the stone and dried pale, the way a bruise goes when it is kind.

Here is the part they still argue about in the market. A man in a grey coat stopped her one morning and asked what the flower was for. She said it was for the bridge, so that the water would remember whose side it had been on. He laughed, then he did not laugh, because the orange heart she had put in the centre had started to lift off the stone and drift east in the wind, toward the far bank, as if it had somewhere to be.

They let her through that afternoon. Nobody ever saw the papers she carried, only the petals she left behind, and some people say the river still runs a little pink where the bridge meets the far bank, if you know where to look.