Black and grey butterfly tattoo with shaded wings on the upper arm of a person wearing a black t-shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly tattoo on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey butterfly with detailed wing patterns and eye-like markings sits on the upper arm, with the arm raised toward the frame. Fine shading gives the wings depth and texture against the skin, and other tattoos are partly visible on the opposite arm. The background is dark and the black t-shirt keeps the focus on the tattoo.

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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

Sit closer, the fire's gone low, and the wood past Hollin Dene doesn't care to be talked about after dark. My grandmother swore the big pale-winged ones that rose out of the bracken were the forest's own lanterns, and every child in the village was told to follow their eyes home. Those painted rings on the wings were never paint. Each one was a watcher, a little round lid of gold that opened when you were lost and shut when you were found.

Keep reading

Old Tom Ashby didn't believe it. He was a wheelwright, and wheelwrights believe in what they can measure. One October he went into the trees after his daughter's stray goat with a lantern and a coil of rope, and he came out at dawn with no goat, no lantern, and a butterfly sitting on his shoulder like change handed back across a counter. It had four dark eyes on each wing, and he swore they blinked.

He kept it in a jam jar on the windowsill for a week. Nobody in the village could say what it ate, and it never once tried the glass. On the seventh night it flew out through the gap in the shutter, straight for the trees, and Tom, who had never in his life run anywhere, ran after it. The village found his boots at the forest edge the next morning, set side by side as neat as a pair of pews, and a single black wing feather pinned to the gate with a wheelwright's nail.

So when you're lost, child, don't follow the lights. Look for the eyes, and go where they're looking.

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