Fine line butterfly tattoo with black scrollwork wings and a red awareness ribbon at its centre, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly with awareness ribbon on upper back

Fine line · Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly is formed from black scrolling linework, with the body of the butterfly shown as a shaded red awareness ribbon. Small red accents and curls follow the scrolls through the wings, and a second tattoo of a palm tree in blue-grey ink sits to the right. The photo is taken straight on, with the tattoo centred across the upper back and a dark garment visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Back Butterfly Awareness ribbon Ribbon Scroll Palm tree

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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 lot of you, because the wind off the old reservoir carries grit and I'll not shout over it. My great-great-grandmother kept the seed vault at Hollin Ridge, and she wore a red ribbon knotted at her collar. Nobody asked her why. In those years a red ribbon meant you had lost someone to the long sickness, and it was a kindness to the neighbours, who knew to leave soup on the step without making you talk about it.

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She had a keen eye, though, and she saw the loops of that ribbon as wings the morning the first moth came back over the terraces. The moths had been gone eleven summers. The silk-scrub had gone grey and the children had forgotten what wings were for. So she unpicked the ribbon from her collar, pinned it flat on a warm slate, and drew scrolls round it with a burnt stick, curl after curl, the way the bindweed curls round the gate at the south wall.

She worked on it all through the dry month. Each evening she added a red curl where the light had struck the slate, and each morning the rain had washed a few of them away, so she drew them again. Her daughters said she was wasting good ink, and she told them ink was the one thing the valley still made in plenty.

Then one afternoon in late spring a moth came down out of the haze and settled on the slate, right over the red loop, its wings opening and closing as slowly as a breath. My grandmother did not move, and she did not say a word, in case it heard her and went away.