Black ink botanical tattoo of roses, peony-like blooms and small blossoms with leaves, placed on the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Vintage floral bouquet across the upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bouquet of roses, peony-like flowers, small five-petalled blossoms and leaves is centred on the upper back, with buds and sprigs spreading outwards. The linework is fine and engraved in style, and the rose and leaves are shaded with stippled dots. The design is in black ink only, shown against pale skin and a white lace top, with the subject's face not visible.

Botanical Dotwork Back Rose Peony Flower Bouquet Blossom 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

The engraving has been propped against the cruet on the breakfast sideboard since Tuesday, and Mrs Pargeter has asked you twice whether the roses look right. You tell her they do. The plate comes from a book of garden flowers someone left in Room Four in 1911: a rose at its centre, a peony opening beside it like a fist unclenching, small five-petalled blossoms tucked round the edges as if the wind had swept them in.

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Every morning before the guests come down, you take the scissors from the scullery drawer and walk out past the washing line to the cliff gate, where the wild roses grow through the wire. The sea is grey and busy below. You cut only what the plate would allow: three roses, one blown and two tight in the bud, and a sprig of something whose leaves catch the light like tin. You carry them back cupped against your apron.

The engraver, Mr Hale, whose name is signed in a corner too small to read without a glass, must have spent a month on the shadows. Mrs Pargeter says the shading is nothing but dots, thousands of them, one pen-point at a time, and that a rose takes longer to make than to pick. You arrange the bouquet in the blue jug on the hall table, turning each stem until the blossoms face outward the way the picture faces. When she stands back with her hands clasped, you see she is close to tears.

"He always did like things to look as if they were going somewhere," she says, and you understand she means her husband, who drew the plate and has been dead since spring. You leave the jug where it is. By afternoon the petals have fallen onto the oak in a loose ring, and you sweep nothing up.