Upper arm and shoulder sleeve tattoo of a shaded rose and blue butterfly over lace-like scrollwork, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and butterfly sleeve on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large rose with green leaves sits at the top of the sleeve, with a blue butterfly below it and grey lace-like filigree and beaded scrolls filling the surrounding skin. The rose and scrollwork are shaded in black and grey with fine outlines, while the butterfly and leaves add colour. The three-panel composition shows the arm from the front, side and back.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Rose Butterfly Leaves Lace Scroll Filigree Bead

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the drip from that arch, it's the only thing left in this place that still keeps its promises. Up where the wall has gone there used to be a rose window the size of a cartwheel, glass blue and rose, and the masons had cut the stone so fine you could hold a candle behind it and see lace in the shadows. My grandmother swore the lace was real, that a lacemaker from Bruges had stitched it in stone by moonlight for a lord who could not pay her.

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The lord's daughter was called Ysolde, and she was the only one who knew the lacemaker's name, which was Maud. Maud climbed the hill every evening with a bundle of thread and left before the bells. Ysolde would wait at the postern gate with a pot of blue ink and a sprig of late roses from the wall garden, and between them they filled the bare stone with scrollwork, beads of lime pressed in a row like pearls along a sleeve.

Then the lord found the roses, and the ink smeared on the steps, and he had the gate bricked up by Michaelmas. On the last night Ysolde went to the window and found a butterfly on the cold sill, wings open, blue as the ink she had used. It did not fly. It sat there until the frost came, and when the men arrived in the morning with their hammers, the sill was bare and the stone was clean as a new page.