Fine line butterfly tattoo with blue and pink swirled wings and black tendrils trailing down the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue and pink butterfly with swirl tail

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with pointed wings outlined in black, filled with blue and pink swirl patterns. Thin black tendrils and curls trail from the body down the lower part of the design. The colour is applied within the black outlines, and the background is plain skin.

Fine line Forearm Butterfly Swirl Wing Tendril

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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 Marguerite, the fish in the walk-in freezer have finally lost their argument with the compressor, so I have been living on tinned peaches and spite since Tuesday. You will want the whole story, I suppose, so here it is. The butterfly came aboard at Tenerife in a crate of blood oranges, folded flat against a sheet of waxed paper like a pressed flower. Nobody knew how it had survived the crane. Bosun Hale said it was a bad omen. Our second engineer, Okonkwo, said it was a dead one and should be binned. I said nothing, because I had already decided it was mine.

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I fed it sugar water on a saucer beside the bread proving drawer, and it stayed. Its wings were the blue of the tiled splashback in the morning light, with a pink bloom spreading toward the edges, and when it lifted off the saucer its tail seemed to unspool behind it, a curl of dark thread drifting across the steel benches. The lads started calling it Mrs Swirl. By the third week it knew the sound of the oven timer and would land on my wrist whenever I opened the flour bin.

Then the ship turned north into the grey, the cold got into the hold, and one morning the saucer was empty and the porthole stood open a crack. I searched for an hour. In the end I found a single black thread caught on the handle of the cleaver rack, curled like a question, and nothing else.

I still set out a saucer every morning. Mostly I am waiting to see whether it comes back, or whether I am simply a woman who talks to a dish of sugar water. Write soon, and tell me the fish are not all ruined.