Colour realism tattoo of a red rose with rosebuds and two butterflies, one orange and black and one blue, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic rose and butterflies on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo covers the upper back, centred on a fully open red rose with green leaves and two rosebuds. An orange and black monarch butterfly sits above the rose and a blue and black butterfly sits to its left. The shading is smooth and detailed, with soft gradients on the petals and wings against the pale skin.

Realism Botanical Back Rose Rosebud Leaves Butterfly Monarch butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The walled garden at Coldharbour House had gone to briar by the time Mrs Pell sent for me, and she wanted the roses drawn before the first hard frost took what was left. I walked out from the village with my board under one arm and my paints knocking in a tin, following the lane until it gave up being a lane and became a path between the beeches of Larkhill Wood.

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The old rose grew over the wicket gate, a red one gone wild, and beside it stood a stone trough full of rainwater. Monarchs came down through the trees that September as if someone had torn orange paper and let the pieces drift. They settled on the ivy and opened and closed their wings as though they were counting something. On the third morning a blue butterfly landed on the rim of my water jar, black at the edges, and sat so still I took it for a painted thing someone had left behind. Tobias, who kept the glasshouse, said it had come out of a collector's case in the attic, where the moths had been eating the others for years. This one must have flown out through a broken pane and found the wood.

I painted the rose open, the way Mrs Pell wanted, petal over petal until the paper was tired of me. I put the monarch above it and the blue one at its left shoulder, and let the buds sulk at the edges, because a rose always has company it never asked for. When I carried the drawing up to the house she held it to the window and said the rose was dying in it. I told her roses always are, once they open all the way. She paid me in silver and asked for one more, the bloom at its fullest, to be finished the week before the frost.

That evening I rinsed my brushes in the trough. The water went pink, then the colour of a bruise, and the blue butterfly lifted off the rim and drifted over the wall without a sound, leaving the surface rocking. I still do not know which of us it had been keeping company with.