Colour tattoo of a butterfly with eyespot wings in teal, red, orange and brown, in a bold neo-traditional style, on the upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful butterfly with eyespots on chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with outlined wings and a slender body sits centrally on the upper chest, with thin black antennae extending upwards. Each wing carries circular eyespots with brown or green irises, and the wing panels are shaded with bands of teal, red, yellow and orange. The bold black outlines and saturated colour fill the frame against the lighter surrounding skin.

Neo-trad Chest Butterfly Wing Antennae Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dust came in under the back door of the petrol station, and Nell swept it out for the third time before the lorry was due. Her brother had left on the early bus with a rucksack and a promise to send postcards. What he left behind was a cigar box of butterflies he had gathered from the roadside scrub, pinned to card and labelled in cramped capitals. She had not wanted to look at them. She looked anyway.

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The one on top was different. Its wings were striped in teal and rust and a sulphur yellow that had no business surviving out here, and every wing carried a ring of eyes, brown and green, outlined in black ink. When she tilted the box toward the window, the eyes caught the light and turned with it. She told herself it was the glare off the forecourt. Then Ruben, the driver who never said more than he had to, leaned over the counter for a packet of mints and stopped dead.

"That one's watching you," he said.

She unpinned it that evening, though her hands didn't want to. The card was warm from the lamp, and the wings opened slowly, as if stretching after a long sleep. She carried it out past the pumps to the edge of the highway, where the bus had gone east in a shimmer of heat. The butterfly lifted, circled once, and settled on the white line in the road, its eyes turned toward the horizon as though it had been sent to keep count of who was coming back.