Colour realism tattoo of pink lotus flowers on the chest with grey swirling shading and a blue butterfly on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lotus and blue butterfly on chest and shoulder

Realism · Chest · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of pink lotus flowers with purple-edged petals sits over the chest, with a stem of smaller buds rising up towards the shoulder. Soft grey swirls of shading trail between the flowers, and a blue butterfly with detailed wing veins rests near the top of the shoulder. The realistic shading, gradients and rich pinks dominate the composition, against a bare skin background.

Realism Botanical Chest Shoulder Lotus Flower Butterfly Swirl Bud Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The butterfly came in on the easterly the week the relief boat failed to reach us, a swallowtail the colour of a gas flame, and it settled on the brass rail of the lantern room as if it had paid for the seat. My father would have swatted it. I let it stay. There was nothing else moving on Skerrin Rock that autumn except the tide and me.

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Below the gallery, in the sheltered pool where the granite dips, the pink lotus had come up that summer, which nobody on the mainland believed. Seed from a crate the supply ship dropped a decade back, my father said, though the crate had rotted to nothing and he had been dead six years. The petals were the shade of the inside of a shell, edged in purple where the cold got at them. Each morning I counted them from the gallery and wrote the number in the log beside the barometer readings, because the logbook was the only thing on the island that asked me for anything specific.

The storm came on the ninth day. I lit the lamp at four, and by six the sea was over the landing steps. When the beam swung round I saw the pool wrecked with weed, and on the far edge a single bud still closed, and beside it the butterfly, wings open, clinging to a spray of foam as if it had decided to ride the wave out.

When the relief boat finally rounded the point, the lotus was gone and the sea lay flat as a plate. I handed over the log. The last entry in my hand read: one bloom, one bud, one butterfly, wind north-east, visibility good. The man reading it looked at me as though I had invented the lot, and I let him.