Black and grey tattoo of a blossom vine with butterflies and small sparkles across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blossom vine and butterflies on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a trailing vine of five-petalled blossoms with butterflies at the shoulder and across the shoulder blade, plus small star-shaped sparkles. The flowers and wings use fine outlines with soft grey shading, while the stem ends in a thin tapering line. The subject is photographed from behind, with the vine running diagonally from the top left to the lower right of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Back Shoulder Blossom Flower Vine Butterfly Sparkle Star

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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 fan arrives on a Tuesday, wrapped in a page of the county paper, and Mr Pryce sets it on the bench between your elbows as if it might bruise. The silk has gone the colour of weak tea and the ribs are cracked at the pivot. Someone's grandmother carried it to dances in Weymouth before the war. You have three days before the Marwood sisters come for it, and paint has lifted from one corner in a fine dust that clings to your cuffs.

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You begin with the vine. Under the lamp you trace the stalk with a sable brush, five petals to each blossom, the centres dotted with a pin's head of gold. The butterflies are harder. Their wings were washed in grey that has blurred where the damp got in, so you work from the surviving edges, the way Mr Pryce taught you, guessing the curve of a hindwing from the one that still holds its shape. Little star-points fill the gaps where the silk has worn thin.

Pryce comes through at closing with his coat over his arm and stops behind your stool. He doesn't say it's good. He tips the fan to the light and says the taper at the stem is exactly right, a single hairline that runs out like a breath, and that the sisters will cry when they see it, which he considers the highest praise the trade allows. You say nothing. You copied that line from the underside of the fan, where the paint was almost gone.

On Friday the Marwood sisters come in with their bus fares counted into their gloves. The elder opens the fan slowly, and the blossoms seem to open with it, the butterflies lifting off the silk as if they had only been resting there. She holds it to her throat and says nothing at all. Outside, the 4.10 whistles through the level crossing, and you realise you have been holding your breath.