Realistic colour tattoo of a Dutch-style flower bouquet with tulips, peonies, a butterfly and morning glories across a person's upper back and shoulder.

Floral still life across a back and shoulder

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A dense bouquet of tulips, peonies, roses, poppies and morning glories is rendered with soft, realistic shading, with a butterfly near the top. Red, pink, blue and yellow ink dominate, while the white roses and the dark background are shaded in greys. The arrangement spreads diagonally from the shoulder blade across the upper back, with grapes and smaller blooms filling the lower edge.

Realism Botanical Back Shoulder Flower Bouquet Tulip Peony Rose Poppy Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pieter had the tulip half done when the frost came off the canal, and by then the peonies in his garden had already gone to brown paper. He could not paint them together. No living garden held them all at once. The merchant wanted a bouquet that never existed, every bloom from every month crowded into one copper vase, so Pieter worked the way his master had taught him, one flower at a time, each lifted from a different season and set down beside the next.

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The widow who had commissioned it, Geertruid Van Loon, climbed the stairs every Thursday with a plate of almond biscuits and stood at his shoulder asking why the grapes were so dark. "They are from the autumn of the bad harvest," he told her, which was true, though she did not ask what grapes had to do with tulips. She wanted to know where the butterfly would settle. He had placed a red admiral near the top, its wings the same flame as the tulip's edge, and she said it looked as though it had only just landed to be painted.

On the last evening he took his finest brush to the white rose at the right edge, the one he had kept grey on purpose, and found he could not bring it to colour. The light was going. He sat back and looked at the butterfly, which he had painted with its wings half open, as if it had hesitated over the frame and might still lift away.

He signed the corner in small letters, wrapped the panel in linen, and left the rest of the rose to the candle.