Black and grey rose bouquet tattoo with leaves and small flowers on a woman's upper back, drawn in an engraved botanical style.

Rose bouquet on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bouquet of a large open rose, smaller blooms and leaves forms a downward-pointing cluster on the upper back, with a trailing sprig of small flowers at the base. The linework is fine and the petals and leaves are shaded with dense parallel hatching, giving an engraved, vintage illustration look. The design is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and a white lace top frames the lower edge of the composition.

Botanical Back Rose Flower Bouquet Leaves Floral Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate had come back from the printers with a smudge across the rose, and Hester Quill spent the whole of Tuesday with a sable brush and a pot of India ink, touching it back to life. Her father had cut the original block forty years before, a copper engraving for the Hallam Seed Catalogue, and he had never once let anyone else near his hatching. Every petal was a row of tiny strokes, each one thinner than a hair, and each one had to lean the same way or the bloom would look like a bruise instead of a flower.

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By Thursday the rose was right again, but the bouquet was not. The clerk in the sales office wanted the sprig at the foot trimmed, said it looked like a trailing afterthought, and Hester told him it was the only part of the design her father had drawn from memory rather than from life. A bramble of small blooms, he used to say, is what a person remembers of a garden after the big flowers have gone over. The clerk did not ask what he meant, and she did not explain.

She sent the proof to the printers on Friday with a note asking them to leave the hatching alone. The lace border she had drawn herself, a pattern of tiny holes like a fishing net, and she had been pleased with it until she saw the finished sheet. Then she understood the arrangement was backwards. The flowers were not framed by the lace at all. The lace was simply the net that had caught them, and her father's roses were still tumbling out of it, as they always had.