Upper back tattoo of two shaded grey roses within black lace scrollwork, with teal and red butterflies, in a realism style.

Lace, roses and butterflies across upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper back and shoulder blades, with two realistically shaded grey roses set within an ornate black lace pattern. Teal and red butterflies sit among the scrollwork, with the largest red butterfly lower right. The image is a collage of three photographs, showing the full back piece and close-up details of the shading and the red butterfly.

Realism Botanical Back Rose Lace Butterfly Scrollwork Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming off the canvas of the Thursday market since eight, and Maud Oddie had given up pretending her lace stayed dry. She pinned a black net panel flat with two brass weights and watched a sheet of puddle creep toward the cotton bolts. Across the aisle a man selling secondhand gramophones swore at his tarpaulin and kept swearing, steadily, as if it might help.

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The panel had come from her grandmother's frame, bobbin work from the lace towns before the mills swallowed the trade, its scrolls so fine a fingernail snagged on them. Nobody bought it. A florist's assistant stopped beneath the awning, touched the two grey roses worked into one corner, and asked whether they were real. Maud said her grandmother had never once got a rose to stay the colour she wanted, so she kept giving up and making them grey.

The woman came back an hour later, hair flat to her head, holding a tin of red wool she had bought from the haberdasher two stalls down. She wanted butterflies in the scrollwork, she said, and not the sort printed in books. Maud looked at the empty spaces between the curls and saw where wings would fall, where a teal pair might rest above the roses and a larger red one could drop lower, as if it had only just decided to stay.

They worked under the awning while the gramophone man finally gave up and went home. Maud threaded the needle, passed it through the net, and tied off the last knot as the lamps came on along the street. The woman lifted the panel to the light, and the wet black lace held, the roses held, and the red wings hung there as though the rain had never reached them.