Black and grey realism back tattoo of a woman with a blunt fringe, a skull, white butterflies and black birds, with a small colour rose visible lower left.

Woman, skull and butterflies on back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a realistic woman with a blunt fringe and closed eyes, overlapping a grinning skull. White butterflies rise above her head and black birds fly across the lower half of the design. The shading is smooth and detailed in greys, with the butterflies rendered as untattooed skin, and a small coloured rose and grey swallow sit at the lower left edge.

Realism Back Woman Skull Butterfly Bird Rose Swallow

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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 yourself down by the range, because this is a story for people who have never been under a hill. My grandmother told it to me in Cwm Teg with her hands in the bread dough, and she never once looked up while she said it. The girl in it was Ivy Mould, and she cut her own fringe straight across with the kitchen scissors the week before the Number Four level went in, so that it sat on her brows like a shelf. She sang in chapel with her eyes shut, because the gas lamps made them water, and the deacon said it was a sin to sing without looking at the hymn book. She said the hymn was in her, not on the page.

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The bad year came in March. The roof came down in the low seam and eleven men stayed under, and Ivy's brother Tom was one of them. The women stood at the pithead each morning in their shawls. Every morning the rooks came down onto the spoil heap, black as burnt paper, and when the whistle blew they lifted all together like a sheet shaken out over a line. On the fourth morning, when the rain had washed the tip clean, Ivy went up the heap alone with a jam jar and came back carrying a skull. It had been rolled out of some old stall by the water, and somebody's tin lamp was still hooked on its teeth, grinning as if it had been told a joke.

She took it to the chapel and sat with it in her lap, singing with her eyes closed, and the mothers said that was not decent. The lime the men had brushed on the old walls that week had dried and cracked, and the wind took the powder off the tip and turned it white, and it rose in little pale flutters over the heap like moths leaving a lamp. Ivy did not open her eyes to see it. She kept singing the same verse until the rooks went quiet.

They came up the old drift on the sixth morning, all eleven, blinking and grey, guided by the rooks that had walked the spoil heap for days. Every spring since, I have heard the rooks come down to that heap at six, and I still keep my eyes shut when I sing.