Realistic black and grey rose with a small purple butterfly tattooed on a calf, with leaves wrapping the lower leg.

Grey rose with purple butterfly on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A large, shaded rose in black and grey dominates the leg, with soft gradients on the petals and dark leaves beneath it. A small purple butterfly with detailed wings sits at the lower left of the rose, the only area of colour in the piece. The photograph is taken straight on against a shop window and wooden step, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Realism Botanical Calf Rose Butterfly Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had gone the colour of wet ash by the third winter, and the only bright thing left in it was the butterfly that lived in the rose bed behind the caravans. Mother Tamsin swore it had come with the show from over the water, though nobody had seen it land on anything but that one bush.

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The rose was grey as the canvas. Every spring it put out buds and every spring the frost took them. The old strongman, who had lifted the iron wheel for forty years, said a rose that will not bloom wants a reason, so the clowns took turns sitting up with it. Dunstan told it jokes. Ida the tightrope walker sang to it in Welsh. Nothing answered.

On the last night before the show was sold for scrap to a council in Stoke, a girl named Orla walked out to the bed with a lantern and a tin of paint. She painted nothing on the petals. She coloured only the wings of the butterfly, slowly, the way you would fill a letter in a book, and when she had finished it lifted off the leaf and went up over the wall.

Come morning the rose had opened, grey as ever, with a single purple wing caught in the middle of it. The show was not sold. Nobody agreed on why, and Orla never said. She only pointed at the bush whenever a stranger asked what had kept the lights on.