Grey botanical tattoo of a scrolling vine with leaves and curls on the upper back, beside the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Scrolling vine tattoo on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised vine with curling tendrils and pointed leaves, with the design rising diagonally across the upper back near the shoulder blade. The linework is dark grey with soft grey shading filling the leaves and scrolls. The photo is taken from behind and close up, with the skin lit warmly against a dark background.

Botanical Back Vine Leaves Scroll Tendril Flower

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

The vine came over the wall of Mother Ashby's cottage the spring after the hard frost, and nobody in Coldharbour thought much of it until it reached the wood. It grew the way vines do when no one has told them where to go, sideways and up, letting out a curl at every turn as though it were testing the air before it trusted it.

Keep reading

The wood at the edge of the village belonged to nobody, which meant the children were forever being dared into it. Tam Greaves went in on a wager with his cousin one thin grey afternoon in late autumn, carrying a lantern he did not need, because the sky was still light. He found the vine again among the beeches. It had climbed a dead oak and turned its leaves the colour of pewter, pointed and sharp, and it had built itself a kind of stair, scroll upon scroll, up towards a hollow where the trunk had split.

Inside the hollow sat a tin box, rusted shut, and inside the box a bundle of letters tied with the same grey ribbon Mother Ashby used on her jam pots. He did not read them. He carried them back down the stair the vine had made for him, and every leaf he passed seemed to tip towards his shoulder, as if it wanted to see where he was taking them.

He brought the box to her door at dusk. She opened it, looked at the top letter for a long while, then laughed once, short and surprised. 'Those were my mother's,' she said. 'She hid them in the oak the year the vine came, because she said the wood would keep them honest.' She set the box on the step and went inside. In the morning the vine had come down off the oak and wound itself round the doorpost, and there it has stayed ever since.