Colour realism tattoo on a person's upper back showing a green frog on a lily pad, white lotus flowers, a blue butterfly and script lettering below.

Frog, lotus and butterfly on a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A green frog sits on a lily pad at the left, beside a cluster of large white lotus flowers with soft grey shading and highlights. A pale blue butterfly hovers above the flowers, and a line of script lettering in a Tibetan-style character set sits below them. The design is rendered in shaded, detailed colour against a plain skin background, photographed from behind.

Realism Botanical Back Frog Lotus Butterfly Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The 6.14 to Ashford has been cancelled again, and you stand under the iron canopy of platform four with a paper cup going cold in your hand. The tannoy apologises for engineering works in a voice that seems to apologise for everything. Across the lines, someone has painted a pond onto the side of the old signal box: lilies, a green frog, a sky the blue of a biro cap, the paint chalked and blistered by rain.

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Your grandmother kept a real pond behind the allotments in Margate. She used to say the lotus opens only when the sun is properly up, and the frog waits all morning on its pad for something worth the jump. She copied a six-syllable chant onto the flyleaf of her prayer book in careful capitals, and when she died you found it folded inside a bus timetable, the paper soft as cloth from handling.

A porter in a hi-vis jacket stops beside you, glances at your ticket, and taps the departures board with his biro. Platform six, he says. The Ashford stopper was always going to be late, it's the same train just pretending. A small blue butterfly lands on the rim of your cup, opens and shuts its wings twice, then lifts off over the tracks toward the painted pond, as if it has been sent to check on you.

You fold the timetable, pick up your bag, and walk the length of the footbridge with her capitals in your pocket. Below, the departure board flicks over to six. The doors are already open, the carriage lit gold inside, and for once the tannoy says nothing at all.