Shaded pink rose with dark leaves beside a black swirling filigree butterfly tattoo on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink rose and filigree butterfly on a back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A magenta rose with shaded petals and dark leaves sits at the lower left, beside a black butterfly whose wings are filled with ornamental swirls and curls. The rose uses soft pink and magenta shading, while the butterfly is rendered in solid black linework. The design is photographed on bare skin across the upper back, close to the shoulder blade.

Botanical Realism Back Rose Butterfly Leaves Swirl Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the awning by nine, so Tomasz gave up pretending the stall would sell itself and began wrapping the magenta roses two at a time in brown paper. Across the yard the fishmongers were sluicing their slabs, and the gutter ran with a sheen of scales and melt towards the drain at the corner of Bell Yard.

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The girl came at half past, holding a black lace umbrella that dripped on her sensible boots. She didn't want a bunch, only one rose, and she counted out coins from a purse that smelt of cloves. When Tomasz reached for the top of the bucket she stopped him with a flat hand. "The one with the bruised edge," she said. "That's the one my nan always chose. She said it was the only honest rose on the market." He picked it out, its petals shading from fuchsia to plum at the rim, and only then noticed the paper butterfly pinned to the awning pole, its wings cut so finely they looked like frost on glass.

She unpinned it and laid it across the rose's stem, the black swirls darkening where the wet soaked into the card. "Nan stood here every Thursday for thirty years," she said. "She bought one rose and left something behind. Says she still owes you." Tomasz had no memory of any of it, only a long row of Thursdays and the grey weather that filled them. He held out the rose and the butterfly sat between their hands, lifting a little in the wind as if it meant to leave.

She went off under the umbrella towards the station, and he stood in the drizzle with an empty bucket, turning over the idea that some debts are paid in flowers and collected in lace.