Two people seen from behind, each with a shaded rose and a butterfly tattoo on the upper back and shoulder, in a studio with an orange wall and a reclining chair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and butterfly tattoos on two shoulders

Realism · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

Two people sit with their backs to the camera, each showing a shaded rose tattoo on the upper back or shoulder. The roses are rendered in grey and brown with soft gradients and detailed petals, and each has a butterfly placed beside it, one blue and one pink. The background shows an orange wall, framed artwork and a reclining chair, with the subjects filling most of the frame.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Back Rose Butterfly Leaves

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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

The officer lifted the lid of the biscuit tin on the steel table and found a rose cutting wrapped in damp newspaper, its stem bound with thread the colour of weak tea. Two painted paper butterflies, one blue and one pink, lay folded on a napkin beside it. "It's a cutting," said the elder of the two sisters before Ruth Adeyemi could ask. "From the bush behind our gran's shed in Varro. The border runs through that orchard, so half its roots are on your side and half on ours. She wanted it back in the same soil."

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Ruth had a declaration form, a stamp and a queue of lorries idling in the rain outside. The rules said plant material went in the bin or the incinerator, no exceptions, and she had signed for those rules herself. She turned the tin in the light. The petals were brown at the edges and shaded darker toward the heart, the way old photographs of roses always looked, and the younger sister kept touching the cellophane over the paper butterflies as if afraid they would fly off.

Ruth tore off the carbon copy and wrote a single line on it: wrapped, not sealed, for personal return. She pressed the stamp hard enough to crease the paper. When she slid the tin back across the table, the pink butterfly lifted on a draught from the open door, turned once above the rose, and settled on the thorns as if it had been there all along.