Realistic colour butterfly tattoo with blue-green wings and orange-red spots on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Blue butterfly on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with blue-green wings, orange-red spots and a dark outline sits on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. The wings are shaded with soft gradients and a slight drop shadow that gives the design a three-dimensional look. The subject is centred on smooth, warm-toned skin, with a grey top visible at the lower edge of the frame.

Realism Back Butterfly Wing Antennae

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The marquee smelled of cut grass and the hog roast, and you were already late for the speeches when Margaret caught your sleeve at the door of the back tent. "She can't find the brooch," she said. "Her mother's brooch. It was on the sash at the church and now it isn't anywhere."

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You knew the brooch before you saw it, because you had watched Ruth turn it over in the car that morning. Enamel wings, blue at the centre fading to green at the edges, a dark metal border, and little orange dots along the rim as if someone had flicked a brush across them. It was small, but when she held it up to the window it seemed to lift off the glass, its shadow sitting a fraction behind it on the seat. You had told her that was just the light. She had said her mother always said the same thing.

You found it in the gravel by the coach park, face up, catching the last of the sun. The pin had snapped. You sat on the low wall with the dew soaking through your trousers and worked the clasp with a bent hair grip, the way your dad once showed you to mend a bicycle chain, and the wings trembled between your fingers as you pressed the catch home.

When you got back to the tent Ruth was already on her feet, the speeches forgotten. She took the brooch without a word and pinned it to the sash across her chest. Its shadow fell onto the white silk a half-inch behind it, as if it had only paused there on the way somewhere else. You didn't tell her about the wall. You just stood beside her while the room clapped.