Black and grey realism tattoo of a butterfly with open wings above a shaded rose on the forearm.

Butterfly and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly with open wings sits above a large rose on the forearm. The butterfly has bold black wing borders with dotted detail and grey-shaded panels, while the rose is built from soft tonal gradients and layered petal edges. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a dark background.

Realism Forearm Butterfly Rose

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

The monarch came aboard in a net off the Dogger, tangled in the bronze mesh like a scrap of burnt paper, and Tom Abbey was the first to notice it shiver. Nobody on the Constance Mary had seen one that far north in October. Tom held it up by the edge of a wing, and the black border with its row of white dots caught the grey light coming off the water.

Keep reading

Skipper Eli Marr wanted it over the side. Nell Pryor, who cooked for the crew and had argued with Eli since they were both at school in Whitby, took it off Tom's glove and tucked it into the pocket of her oilskin. She said a thing that had come that far deserved a dry place to die. Eli told her it was a bad sign to bring anything ashore that wasn't fish, and she told him the sea had been bad sign enough this season.

She walked it up the harbour steps that evening, past the chandler's and the shuttered fish market, to the old rose bush that grew out of the wall below the chapel. The petals had gone to brown paper in the rain, but one bud near the top hadn't given up. Nell set the butterfly on the stone beside it. For a long while nothing happened. Then the wings opened slowly, the pale panels catching the lamp from the lookout, and the thing lifted off into the dark above the boats.

The fleet went out again on the Monday and came home on the Friday with a poor catch and two men's worth of bruises. The rose had dropped its last bloom in the wind. Eli walked up the steps with his cap in his hand, stopped by the wall, and stood there longer than he needed to, looking at a faint grey smudge on the stone where a wing had rested.