Traditional style butterfly tattoo with blue and green wings, bold black outlines and curled antennae, on the top of a foot or ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and green butterfly on the foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with blue and green wings, outlined in heavy black, sits on pale skin with a black oval body and curled black antennae. The wings are shaded with dark edges and lighter blue and green fills, with black curls forming the lower wing tips. The tattoo is centred in the frame with a plain, softly lit background of skin.

Traditional Other Butterfly Wing Antennae

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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

The rain has found the gap in your tarpaulin again, running off the awning in a thin silver rope onto the tin of loose buttons you are trying to keep dry. Across the aisle someone is shouting that the car park has turned to soup. You nod without looking up, because the brooch on the velvet tray has just caught the light, and you have been pretending for three days that you do not know what it is worth to you.

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It is smaller than you remember. Enamel wings, blue at the top bleeding into green at the edges, outlined in a black so heavy it looks wet, a jet bead for a body and two curls of wire for feelers that someone once bent with their teeth. A woman in a yellow cagoule turns it over and asks if it is real silver. You tell her it is only silver plate and a little love, which is the sort of thing your mother would have said, and she laughs, and you let her laugh.

She is buying it for her daughter, who leaves for university on Monday with a rucksack that has nothing on it yet. Her daughter, she says, has never once been told she was brave, so the butterfly is supposed to say it for her. You wrap it in tissue paper. Your hands are steady, which surprises you. The rain on the tarpaulin rises to a drum, then eases to a patter, and the woman counts out coins from a purse with a broken clasp.

When she has gone you take the price card from the tray, the one in your own handwriting, and cross out the figure. Underneath you write nothing at all and leave the space blank for the next person, because a brooch always ends up going where it is needed. The gap in the tarpaulin keeps dripping. You let it.