Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bouquet of pansies and violas on the upper back of a woman with wavy blonde hair.

Pansy bouquet on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with wavy blonde hair, seen from behind, wears a white lace top. A black and grey tattoo of a dense floral bouquet sits between her shoulder blades, with large pansy-like blooms, smaller violas and leaves. The linework and shading are fine and detailed, giving the flowers a vintage engraved look against her pale skin.

Botanical Back Flower Pansy Bouquet Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ambrose Tull had cut flowers into copper for thirty-one years, and he could tell a pansy from a viola with his eyes shut, which was just as well, because the Hartley seed house wanted a bouquet by Friday and the sample sent up from Kent had only three blooms in it. "Twelve, Tull," said the clerk, sliding the card across the counter. "They like a crowd on the front of a packet."

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He walked home by the canal with the sample in his coat, past the lock keeper's allotment where the pansies had gone to seed in tangled purple heads. He took a few heads in his handkerchief. At the bench that night he laid out the lamp, the burnisher and a lozenge of copper, and began with the largest bloom, the one that faced the viewer like a tired face turned up to a window, cutting each velvet fold with a graver until the lines ran like rain on glass.

By the third night the bouquet had grown to eleven flowers and a sprig of forget-me-not that nobody had asked for. His wife Nell found the twelfth on the mangle in the morning, a small viola he had cut without meaning to, its two lower petals curled as if it were listening. She said nothing about it. She only moved the lamp so that the light fell on the shadows he had worked hardest on.

The seed house printed the plate in March and paid him for twelve. Ambrose kept the copper proof, and years later, when the packets had gone yellow in a drawer, the little listening viola was still the only flower in the book that seemed to look back at you.