Black and grey neo-traditional style tattoo of roses, paisley scrollwork and a skull-like motif across a shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and paisley shoulder back tattoo

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the shoulder and upper back, with several roses in outline and fine shading alongside paisley-style scrollwork and leaves. A skull-like form sits to the right of the roses. The linework is dark and bold with stippled or hatched shading, and the design flows across the shoulder blade.

Neo-trad Botanical Shoulder Back Rose Paisley Scrollwork Leaves Skull

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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

The ferry is late again, so you sit on the harbour wall with the leather roll across your knees and count the gulls on the pier. Inside the parcel is a half-finished cover for Mrs Ferrier's Bible, tooled in gold, and it has to reach the mainland by Friday or her grandson's wedding will go without its guest book. You have been at the bench since five. Your thumb still aches from the wheel, and the little brass stamp you press a dozen times to make a single rose bloom.

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Mrs Ferrier comes down the road in a black coat with a sack of oatcakes for the crew. She does not look at the cover straight away. She runs one finger along the scrollwork, where you have hidden a paisley curl that turns back on itself like a wave under the rose. 'My husband liked the teardrop shapes,' she says. 'He called them seeds. Something to grow from.' You say nothing about the skull you drew in the corner, small and grinning beneath a leaf, because she asked for a design that would last and you thought she meant the gold.

The ferry horn sounds twice, and she tucks the parcel under her arm as if it might spill. You stay on the wall until the hull is a dark smudge past the skerry. Back in the bench drawer there is a spare stamp, the one with the skull, and you turn it over in your palm. Next week a man from Oban is coming for a tooled diary with his initials. He has asked for roses too. You think you will press the skull somewhere he cannot see it, and let him find it years from now, the way the island finds everything, in its own time.