Colour Neo-trad tattoo of a red rose and green butterfly with black outlines on a thigh beside the knee, with a close-up of the same motif on an upper arm.

Rose and butterfly tattoo on thigh and upper arm

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The left photo shows a bold rose in pink and red with a green butterfly below it, placed on the outer thigh above the knee, with partial black script visible beside the rose. The right photo is a close-up of a similar rose and green butterfly on an upper arm, with thick black outlines and smooth colour fills. The tattoos use bright colour with strong black linework against plain backgrounds.

Neo-trad Thigh Upper arm Rose Butterfly Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the rose first, the way everyone does at Caerlann, because it has forced its way into the chapel window and will not be moved. Mrs Pryce, who keeps the gate and the iron ring of keys, says a lord's wife planted it to put something red in a grey place, and that it has outlived three roofs out of sheer spite. You are sixteen and paid in cider and bread to clear nettles from the ward, so you nod, keep your gloves on, and go back to the nettles.

Keep reading

The butterfly arrives in June. Green as bottle glass, it settles each afternoon on the same flat stone beneath the murder hole, wings held up like a pair of folded sails while rain blows through the arrow slit. Mrs Pryce calls it a bad sign. Then you bring her the first bloom you've ever cut for anyone, and she calls it a good one. You cannot tell which she believes. You start leaving crumbs of seed cake on the sill, and by August the creature knows your step on the stair before you reach the landing.

In September the tax men come with a surveyor and a red flag, and the word goes round that the keep will be pinned and the rose cut back to bare stone. You climb up on the last evening with secateurs and a bottle of Mrs Pryce's sloe gin. The rose is heavier than it looks, its thorns hooked into the mortar as if it has been holding on for dear life. You cut one stem, then another. The butterfly lifts from the sill, circles your head once, and slips out through the slit into the dark over the moat.

In the spring there is one bloom on the sill, pushed up through a crack no bigger than a thumbnail. It is pink and red, and a green wing is resting on its petals as if it had never left.