Translucent purple flower tattoo with dark outlines and a long stem, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple flower on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large flower with layered, translucent petals is tattooed on the side of the torso. The petals are outlined in fine black linework and filled with soft purple wash, with darker shading toward the centre. The flower sits centrally with its stem extending downward, and a black top appears at the upper edge of the frame.

Botanical Ribs Flower Petal Stem

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 last of the mauve roses had gone papery against the wall behind Hallam's cottage, and you were the only one still going out to look at them. Dawn came slow over the beeches at the edge of Coldharbour Wood, and the petals held the light the way wet cloth does, so you could see the veins through them before you could see the thorns.

Keep reading

Your sister had told you to leave the wood alone. Everybody in Stennet knew the old story about the women who carried a bloom home from the hollow and found it wilting in their hands by morning. You had laughed at that at nineteen. At forty, with your boots soaked through and the church bell going behind you, you knelt in the bracken and cut one stem with Dad's penknife, the blade still smelling of oil.

You carried it home wrapped in a handkerchief. In the kitchen you set it in a jam jar of rainwater and watched the outer petals darken, one by one, from the rim inward, until the flower looked less like a bloom and more like a bruise held up to the window. Your sister came in, saw it, and went very quiet. She pulled out a chair and sat beside you, and neither of you said the name of the boy who had gone into the wood that autumn and not come back.

By morning the jar was clear. The petals had gone to fine grey ash on the windowsill, but the stem had rooted in the water, pale and stubborn, and a single new bud had opened at its tip, purple as the hour just after sunset. You took the jar back to the edge of the lane, set it in the shadow of the first beech, and walked home without looking round.