Fine line black and grey tattoo of a flower with a closed bud on a long thin stem, on the lower leg, with soft shading in the petals.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single flower and bud on a lower leg

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A single flower sits at the top of a long, thin stem that runs down the skin, with a small closed bud branching off partway along it. The petals are shaded in soft greys with darker accents, and fine stipple dots scatter around the bloom. The tattoo is centred on a plain, lightly lit background of skin and fabric.

Fine line Botanical Calf Flower Bud Stem

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

Ottilie Brand counted the seats under the big top every morning, because nobody else would. Forty-one on a good night, a dozen on a wet Tuesday in Margate. The canvas had gone the colour of weak tea, and the ringmaster had stopped wearing his top hat indoors. She kept a cornflower in a jam jar on the old lion's trunk, the only thing still blooming in the whole winter lot.

Keep reading

The flower had come up through a crack beside the generator shed, a single stem as thin as a hair, and she had kept it alive with washing-up water and stubbornness. Each morning the bloom opened a little further, grey-blue in the dim light, its petals ragged like a child's drawing. A bud sat lower down the stem, not yet ready to commit. Silas, the strongman, said it was a weed. Ottilie said weeds were only flowers nobody had bothered to vouch for.

On the last Friday the council letter came, pinned to the gate with a drawing pin. Silas read it aloud in the cold while the wind worried the flap of the ticket booth. Ottilie went inside and came back with a sheet of tracing paper and a pencil. She traced the stem, the bud, and the fine specks of pollen scattered around the bloom like spilt salt, then folded the tracing into her coat pocket.

By morning the trucks had gone south and the field was bare. Only the jam jar was left on the cab step, the bud finally split open. She tipped the water into the ditch and watched the flower turn slowly on the brown surface, carried off towards the main road, going somewhere the circus never could.