Black and grey traditional tattoo of two roses with a butterfly between them on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two roses and a butterfly on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo shows a rose at the top and a second rose lower down, with a butterfly with outstretched wings placed between them. The linework is bold and the petals are shaded with dense black and fine grey stippling, with a few small leaves and stems near the lower rose. The image is a close crop of the arm against a dark polka dot top and green shorts, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Rose Butterfly Leaves Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the rose bed again, so Nell broke the crust with the heel of the spade before she tried to cut anything. Her father always said you could judge a bush by how it stood up to January, and the roses behind the walled garden had stood up to nothing but neglect since he died. She cut the dead canes low, the way he had shown her, and dragged them up the field to the bonfire ring.

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Under the lower bush, pressed against the flint wall, she found a painted lady butterfly with its wings held open flat as a page. It had been dead since October and the cold had kept it perfect. She thought of the biscuit tin in the dresser drawer, the one with the cracked lid where her mother kept the things that had no other place to go: a brass buckle, a sheep's tooth, a ticket stub from the cattle market at Penrith.

She carried the butterfly indoors on a dock leaf and laid it on the table beside the stove. Owen came in stamping snow off his boots and asked what she was doing with a dead moth. It isn't a moth, she said, and he shrugged and went back out to the lorry, which still hadn't come for the feed. By the time the kettle sang the wings had softened enough to move, so she pressed them flat between two pages of the seed catalogue and weighted the book with the tin.

In April, when the cuttings had taken, she would plant the two roses a hand's width apart on the wall, with a dark gap between them for something that had flown away.