Colour tattoo of a butterfly with blue, teal, pink and purple wings edged in black, sitting on the upper shoulder with a soft shadow beneath it.

Blue and teal butterfly on a shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large butterfly with outstretched wings is tattooed on the upper arm near the shoulder. Bold black outlines and black vein lines frame wings filled with blue, teal, pink and purple, with fine white dots along the edges. A soft shadow beneath the wings gives the design a slightly raised, three-dimensional look against the skin.

Shoulder Butterfly Wing Shoulder

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

The frost had kept the milking shed doors shut for nine days when the butterfly came in under the gap at the bottom of the barn door. Ada Penrose found it on the edge of the water trough at first light, wings folded like a closed book, and she swore it had been sleeping in the hay since August. Her father would have said it was fool's luck to bring a thing like that indoors in January. Her father was in the churchyard now, so she set her bucket down and crouched to look.

Keep reading

Old Tobias from the next farm had told her a story about this years back, leaning on the gate with his pipe going out in the wind. A butterfly in winter, he said, is a debt coming home. Somebody gave a thing away when they had nothing spare, and it comes back once the ground has forgotten the cold. You don't chase it off. You give it what it needs and let the debt be settled on its own terms.

She dipped her finger in the sugar water she had mixed for the calves and held it out. The wings opened slowly, black edges dotted with white like frost on a window, and the colours inside were the colours of the sky over Blackcombe Ridge at the end of a long day: blue fading to teal, a smear of pink, then violet at the tips. It walked onto her knuckle with feet like pins and drank. She did not breathe until it lifted.

It did not fly far. It rose to the top of the fence post and sat in the thin sun while ice cracked across the field under a rook's weight. Ada went back to her calves. When she came out at dusk the post was bare, but the frost had melted in a neat ring around it, and a sprig of lavender was tied to the wire that she had never planted there. She did not ask who had left it. She carried the bucket in and left the door open a crack for the warm.