Colour tattoo of a blue butterfly with splashes of purple and pink ink across the centre of the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly tattoo on the back

Back · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with blue and black wings sits at the centre of the back, with its wing edges fading into loose purple, pink and turquoise splashes. The linework is fine and sketchy, while the wings are filled with soft blue shading and dark blue accents. Colour dominates the composition, and the splashes spread outwards to frame the butterfly against the skin.

Back Butterfly Wing Splash Ink splatter

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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 brief from the bride's mother was simple: paint something the guests could take home, nothing sad, nothing with a view of the car park. I had a jam jar of rinsed brushes, two pans of cobalt, one of alizarin, and a folding easel that wobbled every time someone danced past the marquee pole.

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Stan, the groom's grandfather, had signwritten shopfronts in Hull for forty years and considered himself my unpaid supervisor. He leaned over my shoulder and said I was fussing. 'You don't paint a butterfly,' he said. 'You wet the paper, drop the colour in and tell it where to stop.' So I did. The blue went in soft and bled into a streak of violet, and the pink and turquoise came after, flicked from the brush like someone shaking off rain.

Then the side flap lifted and a real butterfly came in off the lawn, a small blue one with black-edged wings. It settled on the wet paper right beside my painting. Nobody breathed. It opened and closed its wings twice, and where it touched the damp edge the colour spread into a faint halo, exactly as I had been trying to make it do all afternoon.

Stan tapped the easel with one knuckle. 'Looks like it knows where to stop,' he said, and grinned. When the bride came to collect the card that evening, the butterfly was still there, slightly warped, with a rim of unplanned colour around its wings. I signed the back, and under my name Stan wrote, in careful capitals, STOP HERE.