Colour botanical full sleeve tattoo of roses, plumeria, anthurium and butterflies across the shoulder and upper arm, shown from three angles against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral full sleeve with roses and butterflies

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The sleeve is filled with roses, plumeria, anthurium, gerbera daisies and purple tulips, with small white blossoms, red berry clusters and green leaves packed between them. Two blue butterflies and a purple butterfly sit among the flowers, and the work is built from smooth, saturated colour with soft shading on the petals. Three angled views of the same arm are shown side by side on a black background, so the design wraps from the shoulder down the upper arm.

Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Flower Rose Plumeria Tulip Butterfly Leaves Berry Blossom

Find an artist for this

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 yourself down by the range, love, and mind the blue jug, it was my mother's. You'll have heard how the Ashworth pit closed in 1961 and left the winding wheel standing like a gravestone. What you won't have heard is about Nell Dunmore and her garden.

Keep reading

She was a pit widow with three lads and not a penny between them, and the spoil heap behind Row Four was nothing but black shale that grew nothing but grievance. Every March she climbed up there with a bucket of ash and a borrowed spade. Old Tom Garside said the only thing that would grow on that heap was his temper. But Nell had a seed catalogue from a merchant in Southport, the kind with coloured pictures, and she studied it the way the chapel men studied Leviticus. Roses first, then tulips, purple as a bruise, because she said purple was the colour of something that refused to stay buried.

The seasons went round. The lads stopped laughing when red flowers the size of a man's fist unfolded out of the grit, glossy as wet paint, and a gerbera opened like a little sun on a stick. Pale stars came up between the leaves, and berries red as rowan. Then, one June, the blue butterflies arrived, two of them, and a purple one that looked like it had flown out of a stained-glass window in the church. Nobody had seen butterflies on the tip in living memory.

When the colliery manager came to pull down the screening shed, he found the garden had climbed the brick wall and was halfway up the office door. He stood there with his clipboard and didn't have the heart to order the weeding. They say on still evenings you can still see those blue ones settling on the office windows, and nobody has ever brushed them off.