Realism style tattoo across a person's upper back showing a red rose, an orange monarch butterfly, black ink splashes and black lace ornaments.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and monarch butterfly across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers the upper back, centred on a shaded red rose with a monarch butterfly in orange and black above it. Black ink drips and splatters run down from the rose, with small red splashes beneath, and black lace-like ornaments curl across the upper right. Shading is soft and detailed on the flower and butterfly, while the splashes and drips are loose and graphic, and the colour is mostly red and orange with black.

Realism Back Rose Butterfly Monarch butterfly Lace Splatter Ink drip Flower

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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

Right, sit down, the lot of you. I can see Gary edging towards the fire door again. You'll remember the spring of 1987, when Mr Pargeter decided the sixth form would paint the hall wall for open evening, and nobody could agree on anything except that it shouldn't stay beige.

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Donna wanted a rose. She'd sketched one from her nan's bush in Hebden Bridge, the kind with petals that fold back on themselves like a sleeve. Mr Pargeter wanted a daffodil. Then Kevin knocked a jar of Indian ink off the trestle, and it ran down the board in long black fingers, straight through the middle of Donna's drawing. Everyone shouted. Donna just looked at it and said, leave it.

So we did. We spent a week working round the mess. Donna painted the rose as red as a post box and shaded the petals with a sable brush until they looked wet, and I did the lace in black from Mrs Oddy's old tablecloth, traced straight onto the plaster. Where the ink had spat, Donna dabbed little red splashes underneath, like the flower had bled a bit. Then on the Thursday a monarch came in through the open window and settled on the sill, orange as a traffic cone, and not one of us dared breathe. Kevin sketched it from life. It stayed twenty minutes, then it went, and Donna painted it in before the paint dried.

They knocked the hall out in 2009. I went along to watch the men take the wall down, and there under the plaster was that black drip, still running, exactly where Kevin had left it. Nobody had touched it in twenty years. Anyway. Who's got the sherry?