Realistic colour tattoo of butterflies and grey shaded flowers across a woman's shoulder and up onto the side of her neck, with a bra strap visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic butterflies and flowers across a shoulder and neck

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows three butterflies, one blue and purple on the neck, a red one above the shoulder blade, and a larger purple and blue moth-like butterfly on the upper shoulder, among soft grey-shaded flowers and blossoms. The wings are rendered with smooth gradients and fine detail, with a realistic, painterly finish. Colour appears in the butterflies while the flowers and background are mostly black and grey shading, set against bare skin and a dark background.

Realism Shoulder Neck Butterfly Moth Flower Blossom Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the Bramley windfalls were soft enough to bruise under a thumb, and Nan had given up pretending she could still manage the ladder. So it was me up among the branches at six in the morning, a jam jar in one hand, the wasps already slow and drunk on the fruit below.

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She had kept a ledger for the orchard since 1961, one line for each living thing that came to it. Red admirals, peacocks, a clouded yellow that stayed a week and then left without a word. Every August, in the grey hour before the sun cleared the hedge, a large moth with purple and blue eyespots settled on the old apple grafted from the tree that had flowered the spring my grandfather went to sea. Nan wrote it down as the Visitor and never once let anyone catch it.

This year I caught it anyway. I told myself it was for the ledger, a proper drawing for the school, a pin in a box. It sat in the jar with its wings folded like a hand that had stopped arguing, and when I tipped it onto the warm wall in the sun, it opened them slowly, the eyespots catching the light as though someone had lit lamps behind them.

Nan was waiting at the gate. She looked at the empty jar, then at the old apple, where a few late blossoms had opened pale and foolish at the top of the crown. She didn't mention the ledger. I let the moth go, and it climbed the stone, paused under the blossom for a long moment, then drifted over the hedge. That evening Nan wrote one short line in the book, and I never found out what it said.