Colour realism tattoo of a blue butterfly, two orange monarch butterflies and a sunflower with leaves on the side of a torso, above the hip.

Butterflies and sunflower along the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a blue butterfly with black-edged wings and two orange monarch butterflies rising diagonally up the side of the torso, with a yellow sunflower and green leaves near the hip. The wings and flower petals have shaded, detailed linework and soft tonal gradients, and teal and green wash-like splashes link the butterflies to the flower. Bright colour ink dominates against the warm skin tone, and the photograph is taken indoors on a bed with the subject partly visible.

Realism Botanical Ribs Butterfly Monarch butterfly Sunflower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lantern, for it has a temper like my late husband's. Forty summers I have walked this fairground circuit, from Bridgwater to the wet fields outside Ely, and in all that time the only thing the travelling folk ever feared was a painted wagon with no name on the door. That was the wagon of Ottilie Marsh, who painted wings on anything that would hold still.

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She came to the fair one August with a tin of teal paint and a sunflower she had grown from a seed in a coal scuttle. The showman said the flower would never survive the road to the coast. Ottilie said it did not need to survive the road, only to be remembered along the way. So she painted it on the side of her caravan, and the petals were so yellow that the bees from the field came and sat on the wood all afternoon, hoping for honey.

Then the monarchs arrived, two of them, and they would not settle. They flew up the boards, over the roof, and off towards the hedgerows where the blackberries grew. The blue one stayed a while longer, dusting the air with green and turquoise, until a boy called Teodor reached up to catch it. It landed on his palm and sat there, quite still, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask it to stay.

Ottilie never sold that wagon. When she died it went to the boy, and he kept the sunflower on it and never let the rain wash it off. Some nights, if you stand at the edge of the field and listen, you can hear the wings going up the hill. That is all I know, and it is more than the showman ever admitted.