Black and grey realism roses with a red butterfly and vines across a person's upper back, shaded in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey roses with a red butterfly on a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several shaded roses in black and grey, with leaves and thorny vines climbing up the skin. A red butterfly with black edging sits in the centre, creating the only strong colour in the design. The shading is smooth and layered, and the composition runs diagonally up the back with the roses spaced around the butterfly.

Realism Botanical Back Rose Butterfly Vine Leaves Thorn

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, there, the boards have been warping since the flood of fifty-one. Now, you asked about the Carrow Street dance hall, and I'll tell you about the night the red moth came in, because that's the one folk still argue over down the pub. Ada Pellow ran the cloakroom with her grandmother's brass hooks, and she'd never once let a wilting bloom past the door. Black roses only, she said, the grey kind that keep their colour in the dark. Then one October a fellow came up the stairs with a paper cone of pale roses wrapped in newspaper, all of them gone to ash at the edges, and he asked her to hold them while he found his ticket.

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She didn't hold them. She put them in a jug on the bar, and by the second waltz the petals had gone the colour of old pennies. Nobody saw the butterfly land. It was simply there on the rim of the jug, red as a struck match, its wings edged in black like a widow's gloves. Some say it drank the water. Ada swore it only sat, opening and shutting, as if it were waiting to be asked to dance.

Here's the turn. At midnight the band played Ada's favourite, and she went to the bar for the first time in eleven years, and the moth lifted and followed her out past the hooks and into the cold. She never came back to the cloakroom. Her hooks are still on the wall, and every October someone leaves a single red petal on the counter, and nobody will say who.