Realism-style butterfly wing tattoo in grey and red with swirling linework, running down the back.

Butterfly wing tattoo across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large butterfly design with stylised wings runs down the back, its upper wing set against the shoulder blade area and its lower wings curving toward the waist. The wings combine grey shaded detailing with bold red panels and fine black swirling outlines that extend beyond the main form. The composition is vertical and follows the line of the spine, with the background kept soft and out of focus.

Realism Back Butterfly Wing Swirl

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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 nearer, grandchild, the fire has gone to sulk and I have only the one story left in me tonight. This is the tale of Ashfold, a kingdom that never had a proper map, where the rain fell upward on feast days and the mill wheels turned backwards to keep the millers honest. Its queen was a bronze-faced woman named Maret Oddlin, and she kept a single butterfly in a glass jar on the windowsill of the high tower.

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The butterfly was not a butterfly at first. It was a lantern moth the colour of old embers, caught by a tinsmith's boy in the lower market and sold to the palace for three copper pennies. The boy's name was Tobin Rusk, and he was the only person in Ashfold who could hear the jar hum. Every night the moth beat its wings against the glass, and every night the smoke from the kitchen chimneys bent toward it like children reaching for a sweet.

One winter the queen grew tired of the humming and ordered the jar carried down to the cellars. Tobin followed with a lamp, and when the lid came off the moth did not fly. It opened its wings slowly, grey as wet slate at the edges and red as a split pomegranate at the heart, and the whole cellar filled with a fine black lace of lines that wound up the stairs and out through the keyhole of the queen's chamber.

Nobody in Ashfold ever saw the queen again, though her crown was found on the mill wheel the next morning, still warm. Tobin kept the jar. He hung it by the kitchen window, where the chimney smoke still curls toward it on cold nights, and if you stand very still you can hear the wings knocking, patient as a clock. That is why we leave the window open in Ashfold. Now the lamp is out, so off to bed with you.