Realistic coloured tattoo of two pink lilies, a blue butterfly and black and green swirling vines on the upper back.

Pink lilies and blue butterfly on the back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two pink lilies with shaded petals and yellow stamens, linked by black and olive-green swirling vines. A blue butterfly with white-speckled wings sits to the right of the flowers. The shading is smooth and gradual, and the lilies are rendered with a three-dimensional, lifelike finish against the skin tone.

Realism Botanical Back Lily Flower Butterfly Vine Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marguerite had the cold room to herself by two in the morning, which was when the lilies were at their best and nobody else wanted them. Outside on Pollard Street the bins were being wheeled to the kerb and a van idled with its hazards going. She sorted the stems by the colour of their throats, pulling anything with browning stamens and laying the good ones on the steel in rows, the pink ones at the back where the strip light caught them.

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The butterfly came in with the Dutch delivery, sitting on the rim of a bucket as if it had paid for a ticket. Blue on top, the underside a dusty brown she only saw when it lifted. She didn't try to catch it. Her grandfather used to say that a thing which comes in on its own has business here. She had never once believed him, but she wedged the back door open with a crate anyway and carried on working.

By dawn the green wire vine she had been twisting round the hotel order had tangled, and she gave up on symmetry. She tied the two best lilies high and let the vine curl away from them like something reaching for the light. When she stepped back, the butterfly had settled on the edge of the display, opening and closing its wings slowly, as though it were checking her work.

The hotel porter came for the order at six and signed without looking. Marguerite watched him carry it to the lift, the lilies nodding over his arm. When she turned round the butterfly was gone, the crate still holding the door, the cold room humming, and somewhere over the car park a gull was complaining about nothing at all.