A symmetrical butterfly design with bold black tribal-style outlines and wings shaded from blue and purple to red and yellow, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black-outlined butterfly design in purple and orange

Colour · Flash

A symmetrical butterfly with spiky black outlines forming tribal-style swirls on the wings and body. The wings are shaded with soft airbrushed gradients moving from deep blue and purple at the edges to red and glowing yellow near the centre. The design is isolated on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Butterfly Wing Tribal pattern Antennae

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

Nobody in Port Callow painted boats the way my uncle did, which is why the harbour master sent for him the week the Marigold came back with her hull scorched down one side. Tobias sat on an upturned crate with a tin of cadmium red and a sable brush worn to a point, working at the stern while the tide dragged at the mooring ropes.

Keep reading

I held the lamp for him. The fire had come off the boiler in the night, Mr Harrow said, though the deckboy swore a moth the size of a hand had flown out of the engine hatch just before the smoke. Tobias didn't laugh. He painted a pair of wings over the scorch, black spines curling like ironwork, the inside of each wing bleeding from violet at the rim to a hot yellow at the heart, as if he had caught the last of the sun and folded it there.

When he finished, the Marigold went out on the morning tide with her new wings, and nobody mentioned the moth again. I still climb the harbour wall at dusk to look for her. The paint has held through three winters, and the gulls won't perch on her stern. Some evenings the yellow catches the lamplight before anything else in the bay does, and I stand there with the lamp I still carry, waiting for the moth to come home.