Printed realistic blue butterfly design with a soft grey shadow on a white card, placed beside a ruler on a wooden surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly design on white card

Realism · Colour · Flash

A printed design of a blue butterfly with black-edged wings marked with white spots, shown in flight with a soft grey shadow beneath it. The shading on the wings moves from deep blue to pale turquoise, giving a realistic, three-dimensional effect. The white card sits on a wooden surface with a ruler at the bottom of the frame, which indicates the design is about 7 cm across.

Realism Butterfly Wing Shadow

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

Brother Anselm has set the lamp too close to the vellum again, and you can smell scorched tallow as you lift your brush. The abbot's instruction was simple: a blue butterfly for the margin of the psalter, in the ultramarine he bought with three months of the cellarer's wine money. You have painted a hundred insects this past year, all of them flat, all of them dead to the eye. This one must lift off the page.

Keep reading

You work through Vespers and into the grey hour after it. Black edges first, then white spots set so precisely they might have been pricked with a needle. The blue starts deep at the body and thins to pale turquoise near the tips, and when you stand back the wings seem to tremble. Then you notice a shadow you did not mean to paint. A soft grey smudge has crept beneath the wings, falling down and to the left, though the window is on the right.

Brother Anselm sees it over your shoulder and says nothing for a long time. Then he tells you that his own master once painted a butterfly that flew off the page in the night, and that the brothers found only its shadow pressed into the parchment like a bruise. You laugh, and then you stop, because the shadow is still there in the candlelight and it is darker than it was.

Morning comes, and the psalter lies open on the lectern. The butterfly rests in the margin with its wings half closed. Its shadow has moved a finger's width toward the window, as if it had turned its head to look at the sun. You pick up your brush to correct it, then set the brush down again and let it be.