Realistic colour tattoo of pink roses and orange monarch butterflies covering a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Pink roses and monarch butterflies on an upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows three pink roses, with one open bloom at the top of the shoulder, a half-open rose on the left, and a larger rose lower down the upper arm, with five monarch butterflies placed among them. The roses and butterflies are rendered with smooth, detailed shading and highlights, and small water droplets sit on the petals. Pinks, purples and vivid oranges dominate the colour palette against a soft, blended background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The people of Hallow Ridge say the monarchs came over the pass before the road did. Teodora kept a hut at the summit, and every autumn she sat on the wall with a tin of sugar water and counted them. She did not count the ones that fell. She counted the ones that went on.

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In the year the new customs post went up, a young guard named Aurelio Pell was sent to the hut to check papers. He had a sister on the far slope, a rose grower's wife in the town of Lessa, and he had not seen her in nine years. He found the old woman scolding a butterfly off her sleeve. "They don't carry passports," she said. "Neither should you have to."

Aurelio laughed and recited the regulations. She listened, then took a cutting from a pink rose growing in a biscuit tin by the door, wrapped its stem in wet cloth and pressed it into his hands. "For your sister. Roses on the far side are the same as these. Only the paperwork is different." He tried to refuse. She told him to stand still, and he did, while a monarch landed on his cuff and opened and closed its wings, slow as a clock, until he could feel the small weight of it.

He crossed at dusk with the rose buttoned inside his coat. At Lessa the customs man asked what he was carrying. Aurelio opened the coat. The rose had a single drop of water balanced on one petal, and a butterfly rested on his collar, orange and black, waiting to be let through. The man looked at it for a long moment, then waved them both on.

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