Pencil drawing of a botanical tattoo design with a climbing vine, tulip-style flowers and three butterflies, shaded in black and grey.

Vine with tulips and butterflies

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a vine running vertically up the page, with tulip and bell-shaped flowers, leaves, curling tendrils and three butterflies with shaded wings. The linework is fine and varied, with pencil shading giving the petals and wings a soft three-dimensional look. The drawing is in greyscale on white paper, with small dotted accents along the stem.

Botanical Vine Tulip Flower Butterfly Leaf Tendril Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bulbs had been in the ground a fortnight before Dilys Carew admitted she had planted them the wrong way up, and by then the vine had already found its way over the back wall of the harbour master's yard. Nobody had given it permission. It climbed the rusted railings, looped through the old mooring rope, and came up between the cobbles with the stubborn habit of anything told it could not grow in salt air.

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Dilys had kept that yard for thirty-one years, long enough to know a tulip does not care what you intended. The flowers came up pale and bell-shaped in April, nodding over the water as if listening for a boat that had gone down off the Skerries in 1974. Her brother Owen had been on that boat. She did not speak of it, and the vine seemed to respect the silence, curling its tendrils politely around the places she did not touch.

In May the butterflies came over from the far side of the estuary, three of them, dark-winged and shaded like pencil smudges, and they settled on the blooms as though they had been invited. Tomas from the chandlery said they were painted ladies, which was nonsense, because painted ladies were gone by June and these stayed through the autumn gales, folding their wings tight against the wind.

In October she finally cut the vine back, as the council had asked. She took her shears to the lowest tendril, the one that curled round the iron ring where Owen had tied his first dinghy. It would not come free. She left it there, and the next spring the tulips came up along the wall, upright this time, the right way round.