Black and grey butterfly tattoo on an upper back, with its wings made of banknote designs and the word MONEY above it.

Butterfly made of banknotes on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly tattoo on the upper back has wings built from banknote motifs, including denomination numbers and the words FEDERAL and OVER, with MONEY lettering across the top. Lettering along the lower edge contains an offensive term. The linework is bold and the shading is grey and black, with the wings and banknote details given depth through tonal shading. The subject is centred on the shoulder blade and the photo is framed from behind the wearer.

Back Butterfly Banknote Money Dollar bill Lettering 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

Nan Ivy folded the last of the fivers at the kitchen table on the Thursday before the auction, her spectacles pushed up into hair the colour of weak tea. Her husband had kept the money in a biscuit tin under the sink for forty years, and she had never once counted it aloud. Now the house on Carrow Lane was going to the council, and the tin had to go somewhere.

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She worked the way she always had, tucking each corner into the next and pressing the crease flat with her thumbnail until a note became a wing. The tens made the forewings, the twenties the hindwings, and the fives she saved for the body because they were the plainest and held their shape. Her grandson Dean watched from the doorway with his hands in his pockets, asking whether a butterfly was worth anything if you couldn't spend it.

She told him a butterfly was only paper until somebody decided otherwise, then told him to hush and hold the tissue steady. He did, and his fingers left a faint smudge of ink on the lilac paper that she didn't bother to wipe away.

On Friday the wings went into a shoebox lined with tissue, and the box went on the bus to a stall at the end of the parade, where a woman with silver rings bought the lot for a single pound and promised to come back for more. Nan kept the last butterfly, the one folded from the first ten pounds Dean had ever given her, and pinned it inside her coat. Some things were meant to stay folded.