Colourful watercolour-style flower tattoo with a black outline and blue, green and purple splashes and drips, on the upper back.

Watercolour-style flower on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A flower-like burst with orange and red petals and fine black outlines sits at the centre of the design. Soft blue, green and purple washes spread around it and run downward in drips. The ink is smooth and blended with no hard shading, and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame against bare skin and dark hair at the top edge.

Back Flower Splash

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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

Mind the step, it's slick where the gulls have been at it. Sit down, then. Ada Vane was up a ladder on the chandlery wall the summer the fog came in off the bar, and she was painting a sun on the boards because the harbourmaster had told her to paint a sign and nothing else. She didn't paint a sign. She painted a flower the size of a cartwheel, with petals that flared out orange and red like a lamp turned up too high, and she drew their black edges with a brush she'd cut from a cat's tail.

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She had no proper paint, so she made do. Blue came from the indigo vat behind the dye-works, green from the sea-kale she pulled off the sea wall, and purple from the plums that had split on the orchard fence and bled into the rain. She washed each colour on wet and let it run. When the bloom was finished, the colours kept moving, the way wet paint does, and they crept down the planks and dripped off the edge of the wall onto the slipway in long thin tails.

The harbourmaster ordered it scrubbed by Monday. Ada said she'd scrub it when the fleet was home. On Sunday night the fog sat so thick the lamps on the pier were just smudges, and nine boats were still out past the bar. Then the painted flower caught what little light there was and burned, and the men at the helm steered for it, because it was the only colour in the whole grey world.

The wall was never scrubbed. The drips are still on the slipway, faded to the colour of a bruise, and the children say they run all the way out under the water to the bar, which is how Ada found her way home.