Close view of a person's arms with colourful tattoos of flowers, a butterfly and stars on the upper arm and forearm, with a pink lace bra and pastel top.

Colourful floral and butterfly tattoos on arms

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows tattooed upper arm and forearm, with bold red and pink flowers, a green butterfly and small black stars. The linework is dark and the fills are solid and bright, with some softer shading. The pastel pink clothing and bright, soft lighting make the tattoo colours stand out against the skin.

Upper arm Forearm Flower Butterfly Star

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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

The butterfly had been pinned to the corkboard for three weeks before it decided to leave, and Nell only noticed because the pin was still standing upright in the cork with nothing holding it there. She stood at the stall on Saturday morning with her tea going cold beside the tin of coloured pencils and watched the green wings lift off the awning and drift over the greengrocer's crates towards the church clock.

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She sold pressed violets in glass lockets and paper parasols that the rain never quite got through, and nobody ever bought the butterfly, because it was only a bit of painted tin. But it had been hers since her grandmother gave it to her, and so she left the stall to Mr Okafor from the next pitch and went after it, past the bakery and through the gap in the wall behind the clock tower, where she had never been before and was fairly sure nobody had.

Behind the wall was a garden full of roses in every shade of pink, and gates painted with small silver stars, and a little old man kneeling in the beds with paint on his cuffs. The butterfly was sitting on his thumb. He looked at her over his spectacles and said he had been waiting a long time for someone to come and collect the colours, because they had started to fade out of the town and he had nowhere to keep them.

Nell did not buy anything. He gave her the pin instead, warm from his hand, and told her to hang the butterfly where the light could find it. When she got back to the stall, the till drawer would not close. Inside it, among the coins, were dozens of tiny green petals, and every one of them was dry, bright and entirely unpinned.