Realistic blue and black butterfly tattoo with white spots and soft shading, on a area of skin with a shadow beneath it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue realistic butterfly on skin

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with open wings is shown in blue, black and white, with a dotted pattern along the wing edges. The wings have smooth gradient shading that gives them a three-dimensional look, and a soft grey shadow sits beneath the design. The blue ink dominates the composition against the pale skin.

Realism Other Butterfly Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Pavilion ballroom in Margate smelled of Brylcreem and the sea on Saturday nights, and I ran the cloakroom with a tin of brass numbered discs and a pencil behind my ear. Mr Harrow's band wheezed through "Blue Moon" every hour, and the sprung floor bounced so much that the coats on the rail swayed like drowned men. A young man called Teddy Ashby came in every week with a battered cornet case and never once asked for his coat back. He would lean on the hatch and talk about the weather coming in over the pier, as if it were my business to know.

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The night the generator failed, the hall went black for twenty minutes and everyone stood still and held onto whoever was nearest. When the lamps came back, a butterfly was beating itself against the skylight high above the dance floor, its wings a blue so bright it looked lit from inside. Teddy climbed the iron fire ladder in his waistcoat, opened the vent with his bare hands, and let it go into the night air. He came down with glass dust on his palms and a thin red cut across one thumb, grinning as though he had won something.

A fortnight later he drew it for me on the back of a raffle ticket, the wings shaded in pencil with a smudge of grey beneath where the shadow fell against the wall. He said the shadow was the part that made it look like it might lift off the paper. I told him it was just a moth, and he said moths were only butterflies that had given up on daylight.

The Pavilion is a bingo hall now, and the cloakroom is a tea urn. I still have the ticket in my purse, soft as cloth, and on the nights I cannot sleep I hold it up to the streetlamp and watch the blue come up out of the paper.