Colour butterfly tattoo with black-edged wings in blue, purple and green, shaded to look three-dimensional, on the upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and green butterfly on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A butterfly is tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade, shown from behind with its wings open at an angle. The wings have dark black outlines and vein details, with blue, purple and green shading that gives a soft, three-dimensional effect. The background is a blurred indoor setting, and the subject wears a white top, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Realism Shoulder Butterfly Wing Shoulder Back

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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

Dear Marjorie, the rain has not let up since Tuesday and the market on Kirkgate has turned into a river of cardboard. I am writing this under the awning of Pemberton's fish stall because my own pitch flooded before seven. You would laugh at me, the great dealer of second-hand brooches, reduced to selling tea towels from a crate.

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Yesterday a man came to the stall carrying a shoebox wrapped in a carrier bag. Inside was a glass case, and in it a butterfly with its wings held open as if it had only just landed on the lid. Blue at the root, violet through the middle, green as a bottle at the edges, with black veins fine as the lines on a map. He wanted forty pounds. I told him the wings were held on with a hair of gum and he should keep his hands off them.

He said his grandmother had caught it in a field near Harrogate the summer the rain went on for weeks, and that she had never once opened the case. I did not believe him until I held the box to the lamp and saw how the colours shifted, like oil on a puddle. I paid him twenty. He left looking relieved, as though he had been waiting a long time for someone to take it off his hands.

I have put it in the window of the tea van, where the rain runs down the glass and the colours change every time someone walks past. Come up in the spring. I'll keep it for you, and if the weather ever turns, we will open the lid together and let it go in the sun. Yours, Hettie.