Dark grey outlined butterfly tattoo with patterned wing detail on the upper arm, next to a white lace top and a red brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly tattoo on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single butterfly is tattooed on the outer upper arm, shown with open wings in profile. The wings are drawn in outline with simple inner lines and patterned cells, and the ink is a dark blue-grey. The photograph has a soft, muted composition with the lace top and brick wall in the background.

Upper arm Butterfly Wing Insect

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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

Four minutes before the lost property hatch at Harrowgate closes, the brooch arrives in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a bus timetable from 1987. Mrs Pryce, who has run the counter since the year the platform canopy was painted green, tips it onto the blotter and says it is not worth the paperwork. You disagree. The enamel is the blue-grey of a November sky over the goods yard, and the black-outlined wings spread wider than your palm.

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The tag reads Platform 4, 14 May, no name. Nobody has asked for it in six weeks, so you put it in the drawer where the odd gloves go and start counting the umbrellas. Outside, the 17:42 to the coast is delayed by ten minutes, and the announcer apologises in the voice she uses for everything, including the rain.

At ten past five a man in a damp grey coat leans on the hatch and asks, without quite looking at you, whether anyone has handed in a butterfly. He describes it before you can open the drawer: the pin that never sat straight, the way one wing was mended with a dab of clear varnish. You hand it across. He presses the bent pin flat with his thumb and says his sister lost it the night she left for Leeds, and that she always swore it would find its way back to whoever was watching the trains.

He does not thank you. He pins it to his lapel and walks out under the lamps. You close the hatch at four minutes past five, late for the first time in twenty-two years, and find the timetable still in the tin, folded open to the last train of that night.