Colour tattoo of a blue butterfly with black swirling vines, green leaves and red berries on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly and vines on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a person with dark hair, with a blue butterfly at the centre of the design. Black vine swirls with green leaves and small red dots extend from the butterfly across the shoulder blade area. The butterfly has shaded blue wings with darker blue detail, and the bold black linework of the vines gives the design a clear outline against the skin.

Botanical Back Butterfly Vine Leaves Berry Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the fire's only good for another hour. You want the one about the blue moth that came down out of the glasshouse roof, or the one about the gardener's daughter? Both, then, and the moth first, because the moth was the reason for the daughter.

Keep reading

When the Sealing came to Orrin Vale, the glasshouses were already grey with rot. Nothing green had grown in them for nine winters. Ada Penhallow was twelve and had a habit of climbing the iron ribs of the old orangery annexe when she was meant to be carrying water, and that afternoon she found a butterfly sitting on a broken pane, wings open, the colour of a gas flame seen through blue glass. It was not supposed to be alive. Nothing was. Yet it lifted off her palm and went straight through the hole in the roof as if it had an appointment.

She followed it, of course. Up past the rusted vents, through a skin of ivy that had no business surviving, and out onto the gutter where the wind smelled of salt. Vines had crept up the outside wall in black curling ropes, and every curl ended in a leaf so green it hurt, and a red berry no bigger than a pea. The moth settled on the spiral nearest the chimney and folded its wings, and the vines bent toward it as if they were listening.

Ada came down with a pocket full of berries and a promise she never told her mother. The Sealing men came for the glasshouse the following spring and found nothing but a skeleton of iron and a girl standing in the middle of it, humming. They say the vines are still there, climbing the wrong side of the wall, and that if you hold out your hand long enough, something blue will land on it and ask you where you've been.