Black and red butterfly tattoo with fine vine swirls across a woman's upper back and shoulder blade.

Butterfly and vine swirls on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large butterfly with bold black outlines and wings filled with black and grey detailing sits on the upper back, with a soft red wash behind the wings. Fine black vine swirls with small leaves and dots extend from the butterfly up towards the shoulder. The subject is photographed from behind against a plain pale wall, with the design filling the left side of the frame.

Back Shoulder Butterfly Vine Swirl Leaves Dot Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Livia, the garden room wall is finished at last, and Marcus has let me stand in the doorway to see it. You will not believe the vines. He ran them up from the skirting in black, thin as hair, curling back on themselves until each curl looks like a fern frond unrolling, and a few leaves hang off them no bigger than a fingernail. Nobody in Ostia paints vines like that. He says the trick is to leave the ends unfinished, so the eye carries on past them.

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The butterfly he made last. It is built out of the vines, nearly, though its wings are heavy in outline, black and firm, the same black the fuller uses on the wool he cannot get clean. Inside them Marcus laid grey shading and bands of pale, and behind the wings, where the wall meets the lamp niche, he pressed a soft red wash with a damp brush so it bled into the plaster like spilt wine. I asked him why red. He only said the butterfly needed something to fly out of.

I asked the old woman who sells honey at the gate what a butterfly means, and she told me the souls of the dead leave as pale moths, so you should never keep one in the house. I said it was only paint. She laughed and said that was what the painters always say. Marcus has painted it anyway, and the red sits behind the wings like a lamp left burning in an empty room.

Come in the spring and see it before the damp gets to the plaster. Bring the good wool cloak, the one Mother wove, and we will sit under the fig tree and count the leaves on the vines, though I already know there are more than there should be.