Colour tattoo of an orange and blue butterfly with black veins over teal watercolour splashes and red petals on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly over watercolour splashes and petals

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large butterfly with orange and brown upper wings, black veins and blue-grey lower wings sits at the centre of the design. Behind it are pale blue petal shapes, teal brushstroke washes and broken red petals, with soft shading that gives the wings depth. Vivid colour dominates the composition, with black used for outlines and vein detail.

Realism Neo-trad Forearm Butterfly Wing Petal Watercolour splash Flower Brushstroke

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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 hailstorm took the greenhouse glass at four in the afternoon, and by six I was still on my knees in the potting shed with a dustpan, sorting the red geraniums from the shards. Dad always said you couldn't save a bloom once its petals had gone to the path, but he said that about most things, usually while holding a cup of tea he hadn't offered to make.

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The butterfly came in through the broken pane as if it had an appointment. A monarch, orange and black, its lower wings gone the colour of a November sky. It settled on the lip of the tin bucket where I'd piled the petals, opened and shut its wings twice, then walked across the soil to a split terracotta pot as though inspecting the damage.

I thought about catching it and carrying it out to the lavender, but my hands were full of glass, so I stayed still. The blue hydrangeas outside had been bruised flat, their heads hanging, and the wind had dragged the teal tarpaulin off the bench so it snapped against the fence like a sail. Everything in that garden looked as if it had been painted in a hurry and then left out in the rain.

When I finally stood, the butterfly lifted and went out through the hole in the glass, straight over the ruined beds into the evening light. I swept the last red petals into the bin and left the gap open. Dad would have fixed the pane by Monday. I found I wanted to leave it a little longer.