Small metallic gold butterflies with black outlines on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade, with a flash sheet of the same design shown alongside.

Gold butterflies on a shoulder blade

Back · Colour · Photo

The collage shows a flash sheet of gold monarch and smaller butterflies on white, a photo of the design on a woman's upper back by a beach, and the design on a white square over grass. The butterflies have black linework on the larger monarch wings and flat metallic gold fill, with no visible shading. The warm gold tones dominate, and the composition places the cluster on the shoulder blade against soft blue and sandy backgrounds.

Back Butterfly Monarch butterfly Temporary tattoo

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

Sit yourself down on that creel, boy, and mind the tar. No, not that one, the one with the gull on it. Now. You want to know why Old Tobias never sold the Marigold, even when the bank came round with their papers? I'll tell you, but you'll not interrupt.

Keep reading

It was the summer the herring went off the Dogger and the whole fleet came limping into Newlyn with nets like wet washing. Tobias was mending on the quay, a fathom of twine across his knees, when the butterflies came up from the south. Monarchs, the lads said, though I'd never seen one that size on this side of the water. Gold they were, every wing of them, black lines drawn round the edges like a schoolboy's careful hand, and they settled on the Marigold's wheelhouse rail as if they'd paid for the berth.

Tobias didn't flap at them. He just stopped knotting and said, "Well, you've come a long way for nothing." Then the wind backed round to the west and the gold ones lifted off all together, six of them, and went out over the breakwater toward the grey.

He sailed the next morning on the last of his credit, and I'll swear on my mother's Bible he came back with the hold full. Not herring. Mackerel, silver as knives, in a shoal so thick the gulls walked on it. Every skipper in Newlyn went cursing into the bar that night.

So when the bank came, Tobias gave them a cup of tea and a nod at the wheelhouse rail. There's a gold smear there yet, if you look. Where the butterflies sat.