Colour tattoo of two sunflowers with grey and black butterflies and green leaves, with a black linework swirl border, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunflowers and butterflies on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two large sunflowers with detailed petals, dark seed heads and green leaves, with two shaded grey and black butterflies resting over the flowers. Smooth shading gives the petals and butterfly wings volume against a black linework scroll border that frames the design. Yellow and orange ink dominates the flowers, with green on the leaves, and the design fills the side of the thigh.

Realism Botanical Thigh Sunflower Butterfly Leaf Swirl Scroll

Find an artist for this

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

Mara had been counting sunflowers since the frost came off the hill, forty-one standing along the curtain wall where the masons had left a gap in the stone. Her father said nothing grew in Kilbride Keep but nettles and bad temper. He was wrong about that, and she meant to tell him so at supper, once the seed heads were ripe enough to bear weight.

Keep reading

The two butterflies arrived in June, pale grey with black edges to their wings, and settled on the lowest bloom as if they had been sent for. Mara sat on the broken chapel step with her knees drawn up and watched them open and close their wings, slow as breathing. The old steward said they were the souls of the Lacey women who had died in the keep. Mara thought they were more likely just hungry.

By August the flowers had grown taller than the wall and turned their great faces east each morning, and the stone had split under the weight of their roots. Mara took a bread knife to the ivy that choked the arch, cutting until her palms blistered, and let the light in across the yard.

When the first gale came it brought down the north tower and most of the wall, but the sunflowers stood. Their heads bent but did not break, and the butterflies rose from them into the rain and were gone over the moor. Mara walked out to the rubble with her father's ledger under one arm and began, carefully, to count the stones.