Colour tattoo of a green and purple butterfly with a red blossom branch on a woman's middle back, in a botanical style.

Butterfly and blossom on the back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare back with arms raised, seen from behind, with a tattoo of a green and purple butterfly with black-outlined wings. A branch of red blossom flowers and thin black swirling lines rise diagonally from the butterfly up towards the shoulder blades. The shading is light, the linework is bold and dark, and the design sits against a plain grey background.

Botanical Back Butterfly Blossom Flower Branch Swirl Cherry blossom

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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

Sit yourselves down on the bench, and mind the sawdust, it gets into everything, even the gravy. I'm old enough now that I tell this story the way the cart tells the road, slowly and with a lot of stopping. Halloran's Travelling Marvels had its last season the spring the big top took water in every seam, and nobody wanted to be the one to say it out loud.

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There was a girl on the trapeze called Nell Ashdown, though the posters called her The Emerald Moth. Her mother had sewn her a costume from a bolt of green silk that came off a dead man's wagon, and Nell had dyed the wing edges violet with onion skins and a little iron. Every night she climbed the ladder above the crowd, and every night the lamplight made those wings look like they were breathing. Behind the ticket booth stood the one old cherry tree that had never been moved, full of blossom, pink as a shop sign, and the boys used to say it was the only thing in the county that had never been paid.

The turn came on the final Saturday. The rain had stopped and the field was soft, and Nell went up with no net, because the net had been sold for coal. She did not fall. She let go of the bar and her arms opened, and the wind off the hill caught the silk, and for one long breath the blossom lifted off the cherry and spiralled up to meet her. The farmer's children swore the petals looped back up the branches like they were writing their names.

Nell walked off towards Ludlow the next morning with the silk folded inside her coat. She never climbed a ladder again, but the tree stayed, and so did the moths that come to it every May, green as old pennies, their wings edged in purple. Mind the sawdust on your way out. It always gets into the gravy.