Purple botanical tattoo of roses, leaves and small wildflowers trailing diagonally down a woman's upper back beside the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple rose vine on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A trailing vine of roses, leaves and small open flowers runs diagonally across the upper back, with the largest rose at the top near the shoulder. The tattoo is drawn in purple ink with fine linework and soft shading that gives the petals and foliage depth. It sits against plain pale skin, with a grey tank top strap visible at the left edge of the frame.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Leaves Vine Wildflower

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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

Your father's vine has finally flowered, and I write this with ink still on my fingers from copying the temple garden lists. The roses came out the colour of the dye vats at Canopus, a purple that goes almost black where the petals fold, and the Syrian who sold us the cutting swore it would never take in this soil.

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I have trained it up the south wall the way he showed me, letting the long stems run sideways rather than up, because he said a rose that trails learns to hold on to whatever it can reach. The small open flowers came after, pale in the centre, crowding the leaves like guests who arrived late to a feast. Nesia from next door brings her girls to look at it each evening, and they count the buds as though they were coins.

Last week a clerk from the procurator's office came asking whether the garden could spare petals for the Eastern festival. I told him the vine is not for sale, and I was surprised at how sharply I said it. Perhaps grief has made me stubborn. Perhaps I simply want one thing in this house to keep growing without anyone asking what it is for.

Come home at the turn of the year if the ships allow. Bring the bone-handled pruning knife, and do not let the sailors carry the cuttings in their sacks with the onions. I have saved the top rose for you, the largest, nearest the wall. It is yours to lift when you are ready. Your mother, Berenike.