Fine line botanical tattoo of a small purple flower with a thin green stem, placed on the neck just behind the ear.

Small purple flower behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a purple flower bud on a slender stem sits on the skin behind the left ear of a dark-haired person, whose hair is pulled back by one hand. The linework is fine and delicate, with soft shading in lilac and violet for the petals and green for the stem and leaves. The tattoo is small and centred in the frame against a plain light grey background.

Fine line Botanical Neck Flower Stem Leaves Bud

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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

You learned to read the river by its colour before you learned its names. This morning it was the brown of stewed tea, slapping against the Mary Ellen as she sat in the lock below Abingdon, and you had a clay pot wedged between the water tank and the coal box, holding one green stem and a bud still shut tight. Your uncle Teddy had bought the bulb from a barrow in Banbury for a shilling, swearing it would flower by Michaelmas. The leaves had other ideas.

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It stayed closed through three more locks, through the rain that drummed the tarpaulin until the cabin smelled of wet wool, and through the night the towpath lamp went out and you steered by the sound of the weir. Teddy said it would open when it was ready and not a minute before, the way he said most things, pipe clamped in his teeth, eyes on the water. So you started talking to it at the tiller, low and sensible, the way you might talk to a horse you did not yet trust.

It opened on the last morning of the season, just as the lock keeper's boy came walking down the towpath with the papers for the sale. Six violet petals, a yellow throat, and a faint dusting of gold where the light caught it. You shouted for Teddy, but he was asleep in the cabin with the wireless hissing, and by the time he came up on deck, blinking, the sun had moved and the flower had turned its face toward the far bank as if it had somewhere to be.

You pressed the bloom flat inside the tolls ledger, between the page for Abingdon and the page for Oxford. Years later the ledger still smells faintly of coal dust and river mud, and the petal in its fold has faded to the colour of an old bruise, but it keeps its shape. Whenever you open the book to check a figure, it is the first thing you see.