Colour realism tattoo of two butterflies resting on yellow flowers with purple centres, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies on yellow flowers on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two butterflies, a monarch with orange wings and black and white markings and a smaller orange and pink butterfly, resting on yellow flowers with purple centres. The petals and wings are shaded with smooth gradients and fine detail in the veins and markings. Vivid yellows, oranges and purples sit against soft green and blue-grey background shading, centred on the limb.

Realism Botanical Calf Butterfly Monarch butterfly Flower Insect

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

Now then, you lot, stop picking at those chips and listen, because my grandfather swore this happened off the Dogger Bank in the year the herring went strange. The boat was the Constance Mary, eleven men and a cook who could not boil an egg, and they were three days out with nothing in the nets but weed and bad temper.

Keep reading

On the fourth morning a monarch came down out of a clear sky and settled on the bait tub. Orange as a paraffin lamp, with black lines through the wings like lead in a window. Nobody had seen a butterfly that far from land. Skipper Hallam said it was bad luck, and Old Tom said it was the opposite, and they argued until the bird lifted off and landed on a purple thistle head that some lad had tied to the mast for a joke. Then a second one came, smaller and pinker, ragged at the edge as if it had been through a hedge backwards, and it perched right beside the first.

They sat there opening and closing their wings while the men went quiet. Hallam, who had not smiled since his wife was buried, looked at the water for a long time. Then he turned the wheel, put her about, and ran north towards where he remembered the dunes smelling of honey and knapweed. Two days later the herring came up silver in the nets, so thick the winch groaned, and the gulls screamed like they'd been robbed.

And that's why the Constance Mary had a yellow flower painted on her bow, and why, to this day, no man on this quay will tell you a monarch is bad luck. Drink up. The tide won't wait, and neither will my ears.