Realism colour tattoo on the upper back of a red rose with green leaves and buds, with an orange, a pink and a blue butterfly around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and three butterflies on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large, realistic red rose with green leaves dominates the design, with smaller rose buds on stems to the left. Three butterflies surround the flower: an orange and black one at top left, a pink one at top right and a blue and black one at right, each with shaded wing detail. The shading is smooth and the colours are saturated, set against the natural skin tone of the back.

Realism Back Rose Butterfly Rose bud Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo had already sold the last of the bunches by the time Dev pulled the tarpaulin back, and the rain was running off the edge of the stall in a clear rope that spattered the cobbles of Castlegate Market. He wanted roses. She had kept one back, a dark red head wrapped in brown paper, and she held it out as if it might change its mind.

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"Glasshouse stock from Holmfirth," she said. "Not the wholesale ones that go brown by Tuesday. Feel the petals. Like felt."

He didn't feel them. He was looking past her at the cardboard tray where her nephew kept the paper butterflies he sold to the children's stall, orange and pink and one blue with black edges, each pinned to a bent wire stem. Somebody had left the tray open to the weather. The blue one's wings were beaded with water, and the pink one had begun to sag at the tip.

"Those are three quid each," she said, watching him look. "Take them, they'll be pulp by morning. Nobody buys a butterfly in the rain."

He paid for the rose and took the butterflies for nothing, and she wouldn't hear of anything else. Under the bus shelter on the far side of the square he unwrapped the paper a corner at a time. The orange butterfly was fine. The pink one was fine. The blue one had worked loose from its wire and was lying on the rose's wet leaves like something that had landed and forgotten why. When the bus pulled in, a gust came off the car park and lifted it clean out of the shelter, and it went spinning over the roofs of the bus station, blue as a struck match, until the rain took it.