Colourful butterfly tattoo on a forearm, with blue wings, black lace-like detail and loose yellow, orange and red splashes in a painterly style.

Blue butterfly with paint splashes on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly is shown in flight across the forearm, with one blue wing in the foreground and a black lace-like pattern over its body and upper wing. Shading is soft and painterly, and the linework is fine and dark. Loose yellow, orange and red washes and blue drips run behind and below the design, giving a splashed, paint-like finish.

Forearm Butterfly Wing Lace Splash Drip Insect

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, before the custard sets. You'll not remember Miss Hebden's art room, the one with the sink that never drained, and you'll not remember the butterfly either, because nobody ever looked at anything in that room but their own paper.

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The butterfly came in through the broken pane in June 1968, the summer Jack Ferris knocked over the blue jar. It landed on the wet sheet he'd been working on, a great swallowtail, and he froze with his brush in the air. Miss Hebden said leave it be. So we left it be, and when it lifted off the paper it took half the ultramarine with it, and the sheet looked like the sea had been poured out across the desk.

Here's the bit you'll not believe. The black on its body wasn't ink. It was lace, a scrap of my mother's wedding veil that I'd pinned to the kiln shelf to dry, and the butterfly had caught in it on the way past and wouldn't let go until the glue set. I kept that one wing in a biscuit tin for fifty years, and it still smells of turpentine and Sunday.

Jack's gone now, bless him, and so has the tin. But I'll tell you what I saw on the telly last Christmas, a painter in Leeds with the very same blue running down the lines of that butterfly, drips and all, as though someone had told him the story. I don't believe in coincidence. Put your finger on that blue drip there, Margaret. Go on. It's still wet. Pass the gravy.