Black swirling butterfly wings framing a teal awareness ribbon tattoo on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly with teal awareness ribbon on back

Blackwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly tattoo whose wings are built from black scrolls and spirals, with a teal ribbon shaped like an awareness ribbon forming the body. The wings are solid black linework, while the ribbon uses soft teal shading and lighter highlights. The tattoo is centred on the skin with the wing tips reaching toward the shoulders.

Blackwork Back Butterfly Awareness ribbon Swirl Wing Scroll

Find an artist for this

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 third tin of teal had run dry by the time Ruth reached the fourteenth landing, and the corner beside the bin chute still showed the grey of the old render. She knelt, dipped the brush, and let the paint soak into the grain before she drew anything at all. Her grandmother had ironed scrolls into garden gates in Kilburn for forty years, and Ruth had inherited her habit of starting at the centre and working outward until the lines ran out of room.

Keep reading

By the Thursday every floor of the stairwell had a butterfly on it, black spirals curling across the wings like the gates, and a fat teal ribbon looped through the middle where the body should be. Nobody had asked for it. The residents' association had asked for the lift to be fixed, which was a different matter entirely, but the children from flat 9C kept following her up the stairs with biros, copying the curls onto the backs of their hands until their skin looked like old lace.

On the Monday a man from the housing office came up with a clipboard and a face like wet cardboard. He stood on the seventh landing for a long time looking at the wing tips, which reached almost to the handrail, and asked who had authorised it. Ruth said the paint was council stock, which was true, and that she would scrub it off herself if he could show her a single reason it hurt anyone. He could not. He wrote something down and rode back down in the lift, which worked, for once.

When the job was finished, the children taped paper ribbons to the lift doors, one for every floor, and Ruth let them. Somebody had drawn a tiny butterfly on each one in ballpoint, the wings pressed so hard the pen had torn through to the next page.