Traditional style floral ornament tattoo on the upper back below the nape of the neck, with a dark central flower, olive leaves and red accents.

Symmetrical floral ornament on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A symmetrical floral ornament sits on the upper back, with a dark central bloom outlined in red and filled with white petals around a red centre. Olive and black leaves spread out above, to the sides and below the flower. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour fills give it a classic traditional look, with mixed olive, red, black and white ink.

Traditional Botanical Back Flower Leaves Floral ornament Symmetrical design

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 hall tiles at Gull Cottage had cracked along the same line for three summers, and Mrs Pender wanted them replaced before the Whitsun lets. Ottilie Brand arrived at the Whitcombe pottery with a box of brushes, a tin of lamp black and the old pattern book under her arm, its spine held together with twine. She was to copy the bloom on page nine exactly, centre and all, and keep her opinions to herself.

Keep reading

The design was a dark flower with a rim of scalloped petals, and inside those a ring of white petals round a single red eye. Leaves spread from it in three directions, olive where the light caught them and black where it fell. Ottilie warmed the olive with a drop of ochre until it looked like kelp dried on a rock. She laid the black first, the outlines firm, then filled each petal flat, the way her grandfather had taught her, so the hand never shook. Each leaf took a quarter hour.

On the second morning Mrs Pender came down in her good cardigan and stood over the tiles. 'It looks like a bruise,' she said. 'Put some yellow in the middle, Miss Brand.' Ottilie shook her head and said the pattern did not allow it. When the landlady had gone off to check the kettle, Ottilie crouched closer to the red eye and found a pair of tiny letters beneath it, E.H., which she had missed on the first reading. Edwin Hale had drawn the page in 1893, the year before he went out in the Mary Jane and did not come back.

She finished the last petal as the tide came up the slipway. When the glaze set, the hall floor held the bloom like a window onto dark water, and the red centre caught the light from the door each time someone crossed it. Mrs Pender walked over it twice that afternoon without looking down. Ottilie left the initials uncovered, packed her brushes and walked home by the cliff path with lamp black still under her nails.