Colourful flash drawing of a butterfly with yellow, orange, pink and purple wings, two purple flowers and curling swirls, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and flowers design

Colour · Flash

A butterfly with outlined wings is shown in the centre, with yellow and orange upper wings and lilac and purple lower wings. Two purple flowers with green leaves sit at the top and bottom, linked by thin dark swirling lines. The bold black outlines, soft gradient shading and bright colour palette give the design a clean, illustrated look on a plain white background.

Butterfly Flower Swirl Wing

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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

The ferry leaves you on the quay with a crate of paints that has already cracked at one corner. The harbourmaster, Tobias Penhale, who chews the same pipe stem all day, says the lodging house on the hill has a room with a north light. You climb the lane past gorse and fuchsia, the salt wind pulling at your sleeves, and by the time you reach the door your fingers are stained orange from the crate lid.

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The room smells of linseed and mothballs. On the sill someone has left a jam jar of purple mallow, already drooping, and you refill it from the rain butt before you unpack anything else. Mrs Carne, who owns the house, brings up tea and tells you the island is full of things that want looking after. She says the butterflies came in with the autumn gales, a whole cloud of them over the cliffs, and that half the village is still picking their wings out of the bracken.

You paint for a week. The yellow goes down first, the colour of the headland gorse, then the orange at the edges where the sun drops behind Samson. For the lower wings you mix lilac from the squill and a purple Mrs Carne says came from her mother's dye jars. Each morning the damp has curled the paper a little more, and each morning the colours have bled further into one another, softer than you meant them to be.

On the last evening a small copper butterfly lands on the window ledge, drawn in by the jam jar. It sits still while you lean close enough to see the dust on its wings. You do not reach for the brush. You take the fine black pen and draw the outline in one unbroken line around each wing. When you look up the butterfly has gone, and only the wet ink is left on the page, with the mallow nodding on the sill.