A tattoo artist uses a machine to add purple and black linework to a client's back, with a second tattoo visible on the artist's forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooing in progress on a client's back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo artist holds a tattoo machine against a client's upper back, adding purple linework to a flower or floral motif. Existing black tattoo work covers much of the back, and a paper towel is held beside the needle area. The artist's forearm, also tattooed, is visible at the top left, and the image has a warm, soft-focus look.

Back Tattoo machine Back

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

You are the youngest brother in the scriptorium at Saint Aldric's, and Brother Osric has given you the violet. He says it must be crushed before the dew burns off, so you have been up since the bell with your sleeves pushed to the elbow and your fingers stained the colour of an old bruise. The lampblack sits in its dish beside you, heavy and honest. Purple, he says, is the costly ink, and the one that lies about how long it will last.

Keep reading

By the third hour the cloister smells of crushed petals and wet stone. Osric leans over your shoulder and watches the cloth in your hand dab at the margin of the Psalter, where a border of black lettering already runs down the vellum like a row of thorns. You are meant to lay in one flower only, a single bloom where the capital letter turns. Your wrist shakes. A bead of violet slides past the line and feathers into the black, and you hear yourself breathe in sharply.

Osric does not take the quill from you. He tells you the black was laid first and the flower must learn to grow out of it, and that a border with no mistakes is only a border that has never been touched. So you wait for the ink to settle, then work the stain outward with the tip of your smallest brush until the bloom has five petals and the spill has become the curl of a stem.

When the bell rings for sext you lift the page to the window. The violet sits over the dark words without hiding them, and the letters beneath still read clearly, every one of them.