Colour tattoo of a purple rose with green leaves and two orange butterflies with script names on the wings, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Purple rose and two butterflies on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A purple rose with shaded petals and green leaves sits at the centre, flanked by two orange and yellow butterflies with black outlines. Script lettering is inked into the butterfly wings. The linework is bold and the shading is soft, with colour applied across the whole design.

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The monarchs were stacking up against the lighthouse gallery glass again, so I sent Tobias down for the cloth before the lamp could cook them. He was nine and frightened of the stairs, but he went. Keepers' children learn early that the light asks for things and you give them.

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Mrs Garrow's rose climbed the north wall of the cottage, a purple thing the salt should have killed years ago. She had planted it the spring her husband's trawler went down off the Dogger, and she tended it the way other widows tend graves. Every September she came up the path with her apron full of windfall apples and asked me the same question. Would I write the names on the wings, so the butterflies could carry them south over the water to where the boats had gone?

I always said no. I told her paper blows away and ink runs in rain, and I was right about both. But that October a monarch landed on my sleeve with its wings still damp from the crossing, and I saw that the veins on its forewings ran in loops and hooks, a sort of script, like a hand that had been taught properly. I wrote nothing. I just watched it open and close while the lamp turned over our heads, and then it lifted off and went out over the black water, south, towards nothing I could name.

Mrs Garrow's rose was still flowering when the frost came. She cut one stem for the table and left the rest for the wind.

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