Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with a shaded butterfly and rose, stars, swirls and the script words No Place Like Home.

Butterfly, rose and script design sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a shaded butterfly with dark patterned wings, a shaded rose with layered petals, and small five-point stars and swirling flourishes. The words No Place Like Home run diagonally in flowing script, with the first word partly visible at the top. The sketch is in pencil and black ink on pale paper, with soft grey shading and no colour.

Lettering Botanical Realism Butterfly Rose Star Swirl Script

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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

The rose had come aboard as a cutting wrapped in damp muslin, and by the two hundred and eleventh year it had outlived two gardeners and was now mine to fail with. I kept it in Bay Four under the grow-lights, where the air smelt of wet soil and the faint sweetness of the algae tanks. Each morning I checked its leaves for black spot and talked to it the way my nan talked to her tomatoes in Rotherham, which is to say rudely and with affection.

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The butterfly arrived by accident. A swallowtail larva had hitched a ride in a crate of kale seedlings from the Hab Ring, and nobody noticed until one morning it hung from the rose's stem in a pale green case. When it broke free its wings were black and banded with dusty blue, and it sat on my wrist for a full minute, drying out, before it moved to the rose. In the ship's archive, Captain Halloran's logbook records that the first thing they ever planted was a rose, and his last entry reads: There is no place like home, and we are all of us facing the wrong way to reach it.

On my last shift before the bay lights cycled to night, I cut a stem, stripped its thorns with my thumb and stood it in a jar of water on the galley table. Then I wrote the old words on a seed-packet label in Nan's looping hand, the way she labelled jam, and taped it to the inner hatch where the stars show through the glass. The butterfly came down from the rafters and settled on the H, opening and closing its wings as if it had been waiting for someone to get the spelling right.