Woman seen from behind in grey lace lingerie, with a traditional daisy and skull tattoo across her lower back and a rose on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional rose, daisy and skull tattoos on back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman stands with her back to the camera, wearing grey lace lingerie, and shows several colour tattoos across her back, arm, hip and legs. The largest design is a lower back piece combining a red and yellow daisy with a green-leaved snake and skull, with bold outlines and solid fills. Smaller pieces include a rose on the upper arm, a mandala on the other upper arm and a rose on the lower leg, set against a plain pale wall.

Traditional Back Upper arm Thigh Calf Rose Daisy Skull Snake Mandala Flower Umbrella

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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

Tuesday, 14 June. The back door of the shop has been propped open since seven to let the wind through, and the wind brings the gulls in with it, so the place smells of Dettol and salt. Mrs Pilling came in at nine wanting a daisy. Not a bunch, she said, one daisy, red at the heart, with a green snake curled round its stem like it was keeping the flower warm. I told her the snake belongs under the petals, not on top, or it looks like it's eating the thing. She said she'd leave the drawing to me, which is more than she ever says to Dad.

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Dad still has the old flash sheet pinned above the bench, the skull with the daisy he drew for Ted Harker in 1961. Ted was due back for it the week after he sailed for Lowestoft and never came back for anything. The paper has gone the colour of weak tea, but the outlines are still hard and black because Dad never let a line wander in his life. He says a tattoo is only as honest as its outline. I have spent three years trying to draw a line he would not argue with.

Mrs Pilling came back at four with the drawing folded in her coat pocket, and I had changed nothing except the snake, which I'd made thinner so the skull could sit a little lower. She didn't look at the sheet. She stood by the window and told me about her husband's boat, how it had a painted umbrella on the wheelhouse roof that rain never got through. Then she asked me to put a small umbrella somewhere on her, anywhere I liked, no bigger than a thumbnail.

I drew it on a scrap of tracing paper while she watched the gulls. Red canopy, black ribs, a little curl of handle. When I held it up she nodded once and said that would do, and I went to wash the stencil off my hands, still wondering which of us the umbrella was for.