Close-up of a realistic red rose with green leaves and an orange butterfly tattoo on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and butterfly on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A red rose with a green stem and leaves sits on the upper arm, with an orange and black butterfly above and to the right of it. The rose is shaded with smooth gradients and highlights to give a three-dimensional look, while the butterfly has detailed wing markings. The background is a dark, sequined fabric and the skin tones are warm, so the bright red, green and orange stand out clearly.

Botanical Upper arm Rose Butterfly Leaves Stem

Find an artist for this

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

Queen Ilsabet of Varrowmere had decreed that every rose in the royal gardens be painted red before the spring thaw, because the long grey winter had leached the colour from the city. Tobin Harrowgate, the only gardener left who still knew how to graft, knelt in the frost with a goose-quill brush and a pot of madder, cursing every stem that would not hold its shade.

Keep reading

A monarch butterfly came each morning to the south wall where he worked, orange as a lamp seen through fog. It settled on his knuckle while he shaded each petal from crimson to a darker bruise at the heart, opening and closing its wings as though it were judging him. He began to talk to it, and it began to stay longer.

On the last morning the queen arrived with her ladies to inspect the work. She studied the single finished bloom for a long time, then the butterfly, then Tobin's hands, which were stained to the wrist. "This is not paint," she said. "The petals are wet." He confessed he had mixed the madder with crushed berries from the hedge where the butterfly fed. She did not have him hanged. She asked him for a cutting.

Years later, when the winter had finally left Varrowmere for good, the rose still climbed the north wall of the palace, and the orange wings still came down to it every June. Nobody could say any longer which of the two had been painted first.