Photo of a realistic red rose and butterfly design on an upper arm, shown beside a sheet of similar 3D-style designs.

Red roses and butterflies on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The left side shows a sheet of printed designs, including pink, orange and green butterflies, red and yellow roses and leaves, with the code 3D-12 printed on it. The right side shows a clustered design of two red roses with green leaves and an orange butterfly on a bare arm against a dark background. The shading is smooth and soft, the colours are bright and the composition is a tight arrangement of flowers and insects.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Rose Butterfly Leaves 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

Mind the cat, love, she's not moved since Coronation week and she'll not start now. Sit yourself down. This is about the man with the case of pictures who came through Hebden Lane the summer the Co-op flooded.

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He had a tin trunk and a stall that folded out like a deckchair, and he sold things you could press onto your skin for a penny. Sheets of them. Roses as fat as a fist, red as a pillar box, and butterflies in orange and green that looked cut from a Sunday hat. Mrs Pargeter bought three sheets for her granddaughter Maureen, who had been sent to the sanatorium at Ilkley and wrote home only on Thursdays. Maureen was going to be a dancer, Mrs Pargeter said, and dancers needed something pretty to show off.

Maureen never came home that summer. The letter said she was mending. So Mrs Pargeter sat on her back step with a wet flannel and a sheet of roses, pressing them down one at a time, counting to thirty under her breath the way the instructions said. The butterflies went where the roses did not. She said the roses were for the living and the butterflies for the ones who had gone on ahead, though she never said which was which.

When she peeled the paper off a week later, the design had sunk faint and smudged into the back of her hand, and she held it up to the window light as though it were a letter in a hand she knew. That was the trouble with the stall man's pictures, she told the girls at the mill. They never lasted, but they always left you something to look at while they did.