Colour botanical sleeve tattoo on an arm and shoulder, with a monarch butterfly, roses and asters, and a blue butterfly on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and floral sleeve on an arm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman's arm is raised across her body, showing a full floral sleeve tattoo that runs from the forearm to the upper arm. A monarch butterfly sits near the elbow, with pink roses and lilac asters below, and a blue butterfly and faded rose appear on the shoulder and upper back. The shading is soft and detailed, with colour ink used throughout on a pale background.

Botanical Realism Forearm Upper arm Shoulder Butterfly Monarch butterfly Rose Flower Leaves Sleeve

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cat. Nobody in Calder Vale had seen a butterfly for three hundred summers, so when Hester Lund opened the glasshouse door one September morning and found an orange one stuck to the sill, she did what any sensible woman would. She shut the door again, sat on the step, and cried until her apron was wet through.

Keep reading

The creature had come up from the south, though nobody could say how far. Its wings were the colour of cathedral glass held to a lamp, black veins running through them like lead. The elders argued for a whole afternoon about whether it should be caught for the seed-keepers or left to find its own way. Old Oona Pell, who kept the bees, said a thing that flies that far has already decided where it's going. So they propped the door open with a brick and waited.

The asters along the south wall had come late that year, purple as bruises, and the pink roses Hester's mother had grafted from a cutting carried out of the drowned city in a biscuit tin were still in bloom. The butterfly ignored the roses. It walked along the aster stems one by one, tasting each flower, as if it were reading a letter it had waited all its life to receive.

By the next morning there were two of them on the wall, one orange and one the blue of a sky nobody under this roof could remember. Hester swore she saw the blue one looking back at her. Its great-grandchildren are still in the glasshouse, if you go quietly and don't scare them off. Go on, then. Take the lamp, and be gentle with the door.