Realistic shaded grey roses with black lace scrollwork and small teal and pink butterflies, tattooed across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses, lace and butterflies across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two large roses are shaded in greys with soft, detailed petals, set against a dense black lace pattern with curling scrollwork. Three small butterflies, two teal and one pink, sit within and below the lace, adding the only colour. The design spreads diagonally across the shoulder blade area, with the lace fading toward the edges of the skin.

Realism Botanical Back Rose Lace Butterfly Scrollwork 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

Sit down, love, the 4.10 is never on time, so you may as well hear it while you wait. My nan Winifred made lace in Nottingham when the mills still hummed, and she could work black thread so fine you'd think a spider had been at it all night. The gentlemen from the merchant houses wanted the old patterns, scrolls and eyelets, and she gave them every one.

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There was a man who came through this station each Friday with a case of pressed roses, pale as milk, grown in a glasshouse out past Trent Bridge. He never bought any lace. He only asked her to stitch a rose into the corner of a handkerchief. She always said no, and always did it anyway, a little more each week. By the spring the whole cloth was flowering, and the butterflies she'd worked in to hide her mistakes had begun to look as if they might lift off the thread and go.

The turn came when the station master found that cloth folded on the waiting room bench, still warm, as if someone had only just stood up from it. Nobody ever said who left it there. Winifred always said the roses had gone soft at their edges, as though the lace were trying to hold them back, and that a pink moth had perched on the platform rail ever since, watching every train come in.

So when you see the 4.10 pull up, you tell the guard the lace is still waiting. That's all I've ever been asked to say, and I've said it every day since.