Woman in a white satin wedding dress with black and grey tattoo sleeves of roses and butterflies on both arms, hands resting at her waist.

Full arm sleeves with roses and butterflies

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph is cropped from the neck to the thighs and shows a woman in a white strapless satin dress with a beaded sash. Both arms are covered in black and grey tattoos that include roses, foliage and a butterfly, with a small butterfly visible near the upper chest. The shading is soft and detailed against a plain stone wall, and the composition centres on the sleeves and hands.

Upper arm Forearm Chest Rose Butterfly Floral Sleeve Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glasshouse at Ferrier Lane had been built for orchids, but by the spring of 1889 Edith Pell was growing roses in it, which her employer considered an extravagance and her cousin considered a scandal. She worked the grafts by lamplight before the gardeners arrived, pressing buds onto stocks with a knife she kept wrapped in flannel.

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The butterflies were not her doing. A swallowtail had come in through a broken pane in March and stayed, then two more, then a whole clutch of brown-winged things that fed on the bramble the gardeners had been told to pull. Edith left the bramble. She told herself it was for the roses' sake, since the moths kept the aphids down, and she did not mention to anyone how she counted them each morning like a second household.

On the night the frost came early, she found the glass fogged and every bloom in the east bed blackened at the edges. She sat down on an upturned seed tray and wept for the first time since her father's funeral. When she looked up, a single pale butterfly was walking slowly along the rim of the nearest lamp, its wings opening and closing as if it were thinking.

She did not save the roses. She saved the cuttings, rooting them in sand under a bell jar, and by June there were eleven plants where there had been one. Her employer took the credit in the county horticultural journal. Edith kept the bramble, and when the new owner asked why the east house looked like a hedge, she said only that the roses had wanted company.