Fine line butterfly tattoo with blue shaded wings and black swirling tendrils on pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly with swirling tendrils

Fine line · Colour · Photo

A butterfly is shown in profile with wings shaded from deep blue to lighter turquoise, decorated with black ornamental patterns along the wing edges. Black linework outlines the wings and body and extends into long curling tendrils that trail down and up around the butterfly. The design is set against plain pale skin with a close, centred composition.

Fine line Butterfly Wing Swirl Tendril Ornament

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 last boat had left Scarrow before the wind turned, and my father stood on the slipway with his hands jammed in his coat pockets, watching the blue dinghy bob out past the skerry. "She'll be back when the swallows are," he said, which was what he said about anything he couldn't mend.

Keep reading

Scarrow had one shop, one pub and a post van that came over on Tuesdays. In June the butterflies arrived on the crosswind in ragged clouds, and nobody on the island could say where they went once they were gone. My aunt Morag had kept a tally of them in the back of the tide almanac for thirty years, and it was the only ledger on the island that never once balanced.

I found the letter in the biscuit tin under the bench where the fishing line was kept. It was written in pencil on the back of a tide chart. It said only that a painted wing is never quite the colour of the sky it was copied from, and that she had gone across to the mainland to find the blue that lasts. She had drawn the edges of the wings like lace, with little ornaments, and at the bottom a line of tendrils that curled back on themselves like the end of a fern.

The next morning a single butterfly sat on the rail of the slipway, right where her dinghy had been tied. Its wings were deep blue at the tips and paled to turquoise near the body. I did not move. When the wind came round I untied the knot she had left behind and tied my own, and I watched the tide come in.