Colour botanical tattoo of blue flowers, peach roses, green leaves and two orange butterflies on a person's upper shoulder, seen from behind.

Blue flowers and butterflies on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A bouquet of blue flowers with dark centres sits at the centre of the design, joined by peach roses, dark green leaves and two orange butterflies. The linework is soft and the shading is gentle, with the petals and leaves built up in layered tones. The design sits on the upper shoulder against a plain white background, with a navy top visible below.

Botanical Shoulder Flower Blue flower Rose Butterfly Leaves Foliage Bouquet Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band has stopped halfway through a foxtrot at the Palais on Lyndhurst Road, and you are standing by the cloakroom with a paper cone of cornflowers Ada pressed into your hand at the door. She swears they came from the allotments behind the gasworks, the last blue thing left in the city that year. You doubt her, but you hold them anyway, because Teddy Marr has not come through the revolving doors and the caretaker is already sweeping peach confetti from last Saturday's wedding towards the drain.

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Teddy is a bus conductor with ticket-machine ink on his fingers and a talent for being twenty minutes late to anything that matters. When he finally arrives he is out of breath, a handkerchief knotted in one hand. Inside it, an orange butterfly is opening and shutting its wings against his palm. He found it stunned on the pavement outside the depot, one wing torn, and he has carried it since the Number 14 pulled in. He says he nearly missed the last bus because he would not leave it on the kerb.

Ada waves from the balcony rail and the band counts you back in. You take the handkerchief and he takes your cornflowers, tucking one through the buttonhole of your coat as though he has done it a hundred times. The butterfly climbs onto your wrist, then onto a cornflower stem, and the two of you shuffle across the sprung floor while the singer asks someone to hold her under the moon. Halfway through the second chorus, it lifts away towards the lights.

The next morning the caretaker finds one blue petal caught in the cloakroom drain grate, and that is all you keep of the night. Years later the Palais becomes a carpet warehouse, and Teddy's coat still hangs by your back door with the buttonhole worn soft. You press a cornflower into a library book now and then. Its blue has gone the colour of weak tea, which Teddy says is still a colour.