Colour tattoo of a large flower with a black outline and watercolour-style yellow, orange, brown and blue wash, placed on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style flower on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large, open flower with layered petals fills the centre of the image, drawn with a bold black outline and a softly blended centre. The petals are shaded in yellow, orange and brown, with blue and red splashes that give a loose watercolour effect. The tattoo sits across the upper back, with a grey top and a wall display visible in the background.

Botanical Back Flower Sunflower Petal Splatter

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 jar-maker of Callen Ford had promised his daughter a sun she could hold, and by the third month of drought he had nothing to show her but a bowl of ochre and a brush worn down to the stub.

Keep reading

Ilse climbed the terraces above the river to the field where the seed-heads grew taller than a grown man. Each morning they turned their faces east and drank the light as it came over the ridge, then bent it down the slope toward the village. She cut one stem with her bread knife, carried the great heavy head home under her arm, and pressed its petals into wet clay while the dog barked at the gate. When she shook the brush in fright, yellow and brown and a drop of red wine from the table fell across the bowl like weather.

The sun heard of the bargain, as the sun hears everything that is made in his light, and came down the slope in the late afternoon to see the thing for himself. He turned the bowl in his hands and found his own colours in it, ochre gone soft at the edges, blue bruising where the river met the stone. He said the flower had been keeping his light for him all summer, and it could keep it a while longer, but it must turn to him each morning or the petals would curl and fall.

Every dawn after that, Ilse's father set the bowl on the sill facing the ridge, and before anyone in the house was awake the painted petals had already turned toward the window.