Colour tattoo of monarch and swallowtail butterflies with pink lilies and purple smoke running down a woman's back, in a botanical realism style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and lilies across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo across the upper and mid back shows orange monarch butterflies, yellow and black swallowtails and teal butterflies, alongside pink lilies and wisps of purple smoke that curl diagonally down the spine. The wings are shaded with soft gradients and defined by dark outlines, giving the butterflies a lifelike, dimensional look. The vivid colours sit against bare skin, with the subject photographed from behind and the design running from the shoulder blade to the lower back.

Botanical Realism Back Butterfly Monarch butterfly Lily Flower Smoke Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit, sit, the queue won't move until the lorries have had their say. My grandmother stood in it once with a tin of lily bulbs wrapped in wet newspaper and a grudge against the man in the glass booth. He wanted the bulbs. She wanted him to know what they were for.

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Nobody crosses that line without something to declare, so she declared the bulbs, and he opened the tin with the end of his pen. Pink tongues of root, a smell of cold earth. He said, "Plants are not permitted," and tipped the tin as if it might confess. That was when the monarchs came down off the wire fence. Hundreds of them, orange as a struck match, folding and unfolding on the sill of the booth, on the peak of his cap, on the back of the hand that held her passport.

He did not brush them off. My grandmother always said that was the first honest thing a government ever did in front of her. He stamped the passport, slid it back under the glass, and said the bulbs could go, provided they were planted on the north side of the road, where the sun came late and the dust settled slow.

Next spring, she said, the verge along that road ran pink for a mile, and the wings came down out of the sky to drink from it, and nobody, not one officer, ever asked to see their papers.