Black and grey blackwork floral tattoo with symmetrical leaves, buds and fan-shaped petals across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical floral design across a back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large, symmetrical floral design covers most of the upper back, built around a central flower with fan-shaped petals, scrolling leaves, buds and small rosettes. The linework is bold and the petals and leaves are filled with solid black ink, with fine dotted and hatched detail in places. The image is a close, straight-on photograph in black and grey, with the design centred and the top of the head cropped at the frame edge.

Blackwork Botanical Back Flower Leaves Bud Rosette Symmetrical design

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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

Sit down, love, sit down. The lift's broken again, so you've earned your tea, and mind the cat on the stairs, he thinks the eleventh floor belongs to him. No, the cloth isn't for sale. It was my mother's, and her mother's before that, and it came over in a suitcase that smelled of diesel and onions. Look at the flower in the middle. Fan petals, you see, like someone opening a hand. She drew the whole pattern in pencil on linen the winter the river came into the front room, and she stitched it in black because black thread was what the shop still had.

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The buds around the edge are the important part. My mother put one for every person who left the village that year, and there were nineteen, so count them if you like, though I've lost track of which ones were cousins and which were neighbours. The rosettes at the bottom are the ones who came back, and there are only two, which she said was about average. The leaves climb up on both sides so the flower never stands alone, not for a single stitch.

When the building was being pulled down in the old estate, the men with clipboards asked what I'd do with the cloth. I said I'd do what she did with it. So every spring I pin it to the balcony rail, flower facing outwards, toward the car park and the bus shelter. My grandson lives in Leeds now and says he can see it from the top deck when the bus turns the corner. He waves at a tablecloth, and I wave back at him.