Colour realism tattoo on a back showing an ornate hand mirror with a monarch butterfly, a pink rose and orange flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate mirror, butterfly and rose on the back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an ornate hand mirror with scrolled silver detailing, a monarch butterfly resting on its frame, a pink rose on the right and two soft orange flowers behind it. The mirror and rose are rendered with smooth shading and fine detail, while the flowers and background wash fade into loose, paint-like colour. Colour is used throughout, with warm oranges and pinks set against muted teal and green, and the design is arranged diagonally across the upper back.

Realism Botanical Back Mirror Butterfly Rose Flower Monarch butterfly

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The woman in lane four had declared a bag of wedding favours and nothing else, so I pulled the zip and found a hand mirror wrapped in a tea towel printed with lighthouses. The back of it was silver, worked with scrolls like frost on a bus window, and when I turned it over the glass gave me my own tired face under the strip lights. Behind me the queue shuffled and sighed.

Keep reading

'It was my mother's,' she said before I asked. Her name was Ruth Adeyemi-Lowe and she had a train to catch at Dover and no patience for being searched twice. The mirror had come from a shop in Ibadan that closed in 1983. A monarch butterfly rested on the frame, painted in orange enamel that had worn thin where her mother's thumb used to rest. She said the butterfly always flew to the roses in the back garden whenever the mirror was opened, a thing her mother told her when she was small enough to believe it.

I should have sent her to the secondary desk. Instead I read the form, saw she'd written 'personal, no value' in capitals, and asked her to open the mirror one more time. The butterfly sat where it had sat for forty years, wings closed, and I found I didn't want to be the one who made it leave the frame under a fluorescent tube in a grey room.

I stamped the form and wrapped the mirror back in its lighthouses. 'Go on,' I said. She walked out past the duty-free, holding the mirror up to the window, and for a moment the glass threw a patch of sun across the concrete like a flower opening on a wall.