Colourful butterflies and a blossoming branch tattoo across a woman's upper back, shown in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and blossom branch on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman is seen from behind with a braided hair falling over her shoulder, revealing a tattoo of a branch with red and yellow blossoms and several butterflies. The linework is soft and the shading is painterly, with the wings showing blue, orange and black detail. The colour ink dominates against the dark background, and the branch sweeps diagonally down the back.

Botanical Back Butterfly Blossom Branch Flower

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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

Dear Ada, the branch is finished at last, though not in the manner Mr Pryce ordered. He wanted the blossom done the way a sampler wants it, neat and pale, five petals to a flower and no more. I gave him quince instead, with the red flush at the tips that comes on the bough in April after a hard frost, and I left the yellow centres wet and unfinished, as if they were still deciding whether to open.

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The butterflies were my own idea and I will not apologise for them. There is a blue one low on the stem, the colour of a gas flame at its hottest, and an orange one with black veins that I copied from the moth Father pinned in the study the summer before he died. I painted that one twice before it looked as though it had landed rather than been stuck there. Mr Pryce did not care for them. He said butterflies were for almanacs.

Last Tuesday he came back with the bill and a question. Could the blue one be moved up to the shoulder, where a collar would hide it? I told him that a butterfly kept hidden is only a stain. He laughed, which I took for agreement, and paid in full.

Here is the odd part. Yesterday I found a single blue scale caught on my thumb, the kind that comes off a real wing. I have no idea where it came from, for the moth has been in its drawer since spring. I have folded it into this envelope so you can see it for yourself. Do not tell Mother.