Colour botanical tattoo of pink and purple lilies, green vines and blue butterflies across a person's back and side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lilies and butterflies across a back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows several pink, purple and white lilies with green leaves and curling vines, with three blue butterflies that have yellow spots. It spans the upper back and wraps around the side of the torso. The petals and leaves have soft shading and blended colour, and the composition flows diagonally from the shoulder area down towards the lower side.

Botanical Realism Back Ribs Lily Butterfly Flower Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had counted the lilies twice before the glasshouse door blew open and let the November in. Her father would have shouted. Instead he was up the ladder at the far end, swearing softly at a pane he had cracked the week before, and she was alone with forty pots of Lilium speciosum that had been forced into bloom too early for anyone to want them.

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She knew what the buyers in Leeds would say. Pink and white trumpets, spotted like a fawn's back, and nothing in the wide world of flowers as stubborn about its own perfume. She had been told to pack them in straw and send them south on the early train. Instead she carried the nearest pot to the open door and set it on the step, where the cold could find the bulbs and tell them the truth about the season.

The butterflies came in with the draught. Three of them, blue as a kingfisher's back, each wing ringed with yellow eyes that had been sitting in the rafters all summer, waiting for someone to notice. They settled on the petals as though they had been ordered. Ada held her breath and did not move, and her father, halfway down the ladder, stopped swearing and simply watched.

"Well," he said at last. "Leave the door, then."

By March the bulbs had gone to seed and the frost had split two more panes. Nobody in Leeds ever learned which lilies had been sold. But the blue wings came back each spring to the same rafters, and her father, who had never once trusted a gift, swept the floor around them and said nothing at all.