Realistic colour tattoo of a pink petunia-style flower with a blue ladybird on the petals, set against a teal shadow on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink flower with a blue ladybird

Realism · Colour · Photo

A large pink flower with veined, shaded petals and yellow-green stamens at its centre fills the frame, with a teal shadow behind it. A small blue ladybird with black spots sits on the right-hand petals and is rendered with soft highlights. The colours are saturated and the petal shading gives the flower a lifelike, three-dimensional look.

Realism Botanical Flower Ladybird Beetle Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pryce kept her petunias along the yard wall, and the whole street knew it was the only thing in Ystrad Hollow that grew without being told. Dad said the slag heap had poisoned the soil for a mile, but she only shook her head and fed them cold tea leaves from the pot. I was nine the summer the pit gates went quiet, and I spent every afternoon on her step with a jam jar of water, waiting for her to finish swearing at the coal board.

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The ladybird came in July. It was blue, which Mrs Pryce said was the most ridiculous thing she had ever seen, and she made me look at it on the lowest petal three times before she would believe it was real. 'Bad luck, a blue one,' she said, though she didn't seem bothered. My brother Tomos swore it was a beetle that had been dipped in lamp-room paint. We argued about it until the lamp-room lads came up the lane with their dinner tins and settled it by ignoring us.

When the strike ended, the men came home thinner and quieter, and the first thing Dad did was walk to that wall and count the blooms, the way you check a shift board. Mrs Pryce had gone to her sister's in Barry by then. She left me cuttings wrapped in newspaper inside a biscuit tin, with a note in pencil: keep the blue one company.

I planted them against our own wall in the spring. Something in the ground must have been right after all, because the first flower opened on the Friday, and sitting on its lowest petal, shining like a chip of lamp-glass, was a small blue beetle that nobody in our house had put there.