Hand-coloured botanical flash design of three butterflies and pink buds on a curling vine, drawn on white paper.

Butterflies and flowering vine design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A drawn tattoo design showing three butterflies in brown, purple and turquoise, with orange and yellow wing panels and black outlines. Pink flower buds and green leaves sit along a single curling black vine that sweeps up the sheet. The linework is bold and even, with flat colour fills on white paper and no shading.

Botanical Butterfly Flower Bud Vine Leaf Swirl

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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

Mind the step, there, and keep your hands out of the peanuts. Right, sit down, the lot of you. My grandmother ran the tea tent at Marsden Green for forty summers, and she always said the best thing about a travelling fair was that nobody could stay put long enough to be sure of anything. So when the Hollis brothers pulled up in the wet with a caravan full of painted pots and no proper licence for the ground, she didn't ask where they were from. She asked whether they could mend a kettle.

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The eldest, Tomas, could mend anything with a hinge. The younger one, Ivo, could draw. He drew on everything, the back of ticket stubs, the lids of biscuit tins, the inside of the caravan door, until his brother said the thing was costing them more in paper than they took at the rides. So Ivo sat up on the step each evening with a pot of ink and a box of coloured pencils and made the swallowtails come out of nothing. Brown ones for the dry weeks. Purple for the nights the moon was up. A turquoise one, he said, because his mother had worn that colour to every wedding in the parish and he wanted something to go on living after the bunting came down.

He never did finish the vine. Every sheet he started, the stem went up off the edge of the page and wouldn't come back down, and he'd sigh and let it curl. That summer the buds on the hedgerows opened all at once, and the butterflies came out of the lane and settled on his pencil case. My grandmother swore the brown one flew off west, towards the coast, and the turquoise one stayed in the tent until the first frost, sipping from her sugar bowl. Ivo's drawings are still pinned up in that tea tent, if you go looking. The vine's still climbing. Nobody's ever found the top of it.