Colour realism floral sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, showing a red rose, daisies, pansies, a hibiscus, a hummingbird and a blue butterfly.

Realistic floral sleeve with rose and butterfly

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with a full floral sleeve. A large red rose sits low on the arm, surrounded by white daisies, while pansies, a pink hibiscus, a hummingbird and a blue butterfly rise toward the shoulder. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft watercolour-style washes of yellow, pink and green behind the flowers.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Daisy Pansy Hibiscus Hummingbird Butterfly Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had a mouthful of pins and a hem of canvas in her lap when the wind got under the painted backdrop and tore it loose from the ride's frame. The fair was three hours from opening. Behind the dodgems her father's old lorry sat with its tailgate down, and the rest of the crew were still hauling cable from the trailers in the drizzle.

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The backdrop was a garden, thirty feet of it, painted by hand the winter before in a shed outside Stoke. A red rose the size of a cartwheel sat low on the left, daisies crowding its roots, and above them pansies leaned toward a blue butterfly that had settled on a yellow bloom no real flower had ever matched. Ada had painted the hummingbird last, and her father had told her it hovered too low. He had been wrong about that, but she never told him so.

She pinned the canvas and worked the stitches until the light went grey and then gold, and by then the crew had gathered round to watch. Dev from the generator van said it looked as if someone had cut a garden out of a summer and nailed it to the fence. Nobody mentioned that the butterfly was new, or that Ada had painted it the morning her father went into the hospice, because she needed something bright to look at while she worked.

When the gates opened, the garden hung above the ferris wheel, and families stopped in front of it with their children on their shoulders. Her father would have said the hummingbird was still too low. Ada let him have it, and went to see about the generator.