Colour tattoo of a red tulip with green and blue leaves, outlined in black, on a person's upper back below the neck.

Red tulip on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A red tulip with a bud and two broad leaves is outlined in bold black linework. The petals and leaves use soft gradient shading, with red fading to dark at the base of the bloom and green shifting to teal in the leaves. The tattoo is centred on the upper back against a plain, pale background, with the neck and some hair visible at the top of the frame.

Botanical Traditional Back Tulip Flower Bud Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule would go no further than the last cairn, so Ilse knelt in the snow and unpicked the knots on the sacking. Forty bulbs lay packed in wet moss inside the crate, each one worth a season's wages in the valley towns. The wind came off the col in flat, bitter sheets. She counted them twice with stiff fingers, the way her father had taught her, and found them all.

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Below the pass lay Vellach, where a broker named Mattias Roth had promised to buy whatever she could carry down before the road closed. He had laughed when she first asked. Tulips, up here? Nobody grew them so high. But the seed widow from the eastern plots had sent word that her bulbs had survived one hard winter already, and that was enough to borrow the mule and gamble on the crossing.

Near the cairn she found a cart tipped on its side, one wheel spun off into the scree. A man lay beneath it with his leg bound in a shirt gone stiff with blood. He asked for water, then asked what she was carrying. When she told him, he laughed weakly and said a flower was a poor thing to trade for a life. She tore a strip from her shawl and bound his leg instead, then unwrapped the reddest bulb and pressed it into his palm. Plant it where the morning sun reaches first. It is the only promise I can spare.

In April, a letter came up the valley road. The bulb had broken through the meltwater beside a stone wall in Vellach, a red bud standing above two dark, glossy leaves. Ilse read it twice at the inn door, folded it into her coat, and climbed back up to the pass to see whether the cart had been righted and whether the man had kept his word.