Two realistic red lilies with black dotwork, ink splashes and small birds tattooed across a person's upper back.

Red lilies and dotwork across a back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman's upper back carries two large, realistic red lilies set against a fading field of black dots and a large black ink splash. Small black birds and red splashes trail up towards the shoulder, and a line of script runs vertically beside the lower flower. The shading on the petals is smooth and the colour is saturated red with solid black, with the composition sweeping diagonally from the lower left to the upper right.

Dotwork Botanical Realism Back Lily Flower Dot Ink splash Bird Script Splatter Rose

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

Brother Anselm had spent three days on the lily for the Michaelmas gradual, and when the ink pot tipped against his sleeve, the black bloomed across the vellum like night coming down over a field. He swore under his breath, then stopped, because the abbot's rule on swearing was stricter than the rule on spilled ink, and because he was looking at the thing properly for the first time.

Keep reading

The dots had been his own idea, a rhythm of tiny stops he had pricked into the margin to measure the spacing of the hours. They ran up the page in rows that thinned as they climbed, like rain easing off. The splash sat where the dark should have been, and beside it the red he had mixed from madder and lead stood wet and bright. Two lilies had already opened on the page, their petals curled back so far he could almost count the stamens, and he saw that the stain was a second field, a dark meadow the flowers had been waiting in.

Brother Ruadhán came in with the bread and found him laughing at the page. "You've ruined it," he said. Anselm shook his head, dipped the finest pen he owned, and drew a line of small birds lifting off the black, one for each psalm he had not yet finished copying. Then he wrote, in the cramped hand reserved for private sayings, the words his mother used to say at the gate: love me as I am. It was not in the Rule, but nobody would think to check the margins.

By vespers the page was drying on the sill, and the birds seemed to be climbing towards the window. Anselm left it there. The abbot, when he saw it, looked at it for a long time, then turned it face down and said nothing, which in that house was as close to a blessing as anyone came.