Colourful watercolour style hibiscus flowers with green leaves tattooed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hibiscus flowers on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A cluster of hibiscus blooms in pink, turquoise and orange is tattooed across the upper back, with green leaves filling the gaps between the flowers. The petals are rendered with soft, blended edges and loose splashes of colour, giving a painterly watercolour effect. The design is centred on the shoulder blade against a plain teal background.

Botanical Back Shoulder Hibiscus Flower Leaves Bouquet Petal

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 hibiscus came up the cliff path in a wheelbarrow, one pot at a time, because Mr Tregear swore the glasshouse at Gull Point would never hold a bloom that didn't cost him a week of sleep. Nell Pascoe wheeled the last of them past the lighthouse steps on a Tuesday in June, her apron already speckled with the pink that had dripped off her brush the day before.

Keep reading

She had been hired to paint the signboard for the new tea room, not the flowers, but the flowers had got into her hands. Every evening after the lamp was lit she sat on the bench below the gallery and tried to match the turquoise of the water at the turn of the tide, which was never the same colour twice. Her father, who had kept the light for thirty-one years before his eyes gave out, said the trick was to let the water do half the work. Wet the paper, drop the colour in, and step back before it sets.

The storm came in off the Atlantic on the third night. Rain drove sideways across the glasshouse panes, and the beam swept the cove every twenty seconds, painting the cliffs white, then black. Nell lay awake counting the flashes and thinking of the pots lined along the potting bench. In the morning two had toppled, and the glass was streaked with salt, but the hibiscus had held. The blooms had soaked open, and the petals had bled into the leaves like colour dropped on wet paper.

She carried the least-broken one down to the tea room and set it on the sill beside the signboard. Mr Tregear came in, looked at the flower for a long moment, and asked whether she could do the same on the shutters. Nell said she could, and went back up the path for her brushes, the pink still drying on her sleeve.