Black line-work botanical tattoo of a rose, peony and sprigs on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Rose and peony outline on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is seen from behind, with her dark hair falling forward and her face turned away. A black outline tattoo of a rose, a peony, leaves, small blossoms and trailing stems spreads from the shoulder blade down across the upper back. The linework is fine and even with no shading, and the ink is black against a soft-focus dark background and a green top.

Fine line Botanical Back Shoulder Rose Peony Flower Leaves Blossom Stem Sprig Woman

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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

Right, sit down and stop fidgeting, because this is the true one, the one about Mairi Lennox and the ink she carried across the sound in a shortbread tin. Her father drew with a steel nib on the backs of ration cards, and when he died she found his drawings folded inside his Bible, each one a flower he had never grown. A rose with its petals rolled like wet paper. A peony bowed under its own weight. Sprigs of lily of the valley with bells no bigger than barley grains.

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Now the island had no garden to speak of, only wind, sheep and one rowan by the chapel wall. So Mairi did what her father taught her and walked the cliff path after rain, drawing whatever she could find. The rose she took from the hedge at the ferry slip, where a cutting thrown off a boat in 1911 had taken root and refused to die. The peony she found nowhere until the minister's wife produced one from a book, pressed flat as a letter, and said, you may have it, but you bring back the same stems when you are done.

Mairi drew everything in one black line, no shading, because shading was for people with time to waste in the dark. She let the trailing stems run down the margin the way rainwater runs off a slate roof, and pinned the sheet to the post office wall where the ferrymen would see it.

The Tuesday boat brought a stranger with a second tin under his arm. Inside was a rose, drawn in the same steel nib, the same hand. He held it against Mairi's sheet, and the stems met at the edge without a gap, as if her father had drawn one long bush and cut it in two so that each of them would have half.