Colour realism tattoo of a teal butterfly and a red-orange butterfly with a small pink flower on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two butterflies and a flower on the upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a teal-blue butterfly with pale wing veins and dark eyespots, and a smaller red and orange butterfly beside it, both drawn with soft shading. A small pink flower and scattered petals sit beneath them on the skin. The colours are bright and the wings are shaded to suggest depth, against a dark background at the top of the frame.

Realism Back Butterfly Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair pulled into the rec ground at Hollins Green the week after the frost, and by Tuesday my father had me up a stepladder with a tin of teal and a brush worth more than the van. He was repainting the gondolas on the Cups ride, and Mam had said the children would not sit in anything grey. So every panel got a butterfly, wings opened wide, and I was given the blue one because my hand was steadiest.

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The red one was not ours. Two summers back a lad called Teddy Moss had worked the lights for a rival show, and he had left a card stencil in the back of our lorry, a monarch with its edges worn soft from handling. I traced it in orange, then, because I was fourteen and cross about something I can't remember now, I made its wings redder than any butterfly has a right to be. Dad looked at it for a long time and said nothing, which from him was praise.

Teddy came back on the last night to mend a generator that had been cutting out all week. He stood at the foot of the ladder with his hands in his coat and tipped his head at the red wings. He said his nan used to tell him butterflies only settle where somebody has finally stopped moving. I didn't know what to say to that, so I kept painting.

We struck the rides before dawn. When the lorry doors shut I saw a scatter of pink paper blossom from the coconut shy blowing across the cold grass, and above it, on the gondola still standing, the two painted wings caught the first light and seemed, for a moment, to lift.