Lilac and grey butterfly tattoo with filigree scrollwork wings and a heart-shaped top, placed on the forearm, with a small red heart tattoo partly visible at the bottom left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lilac butterfly and heart on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly tattoo sits on the forearm, with wings formed from a ribbon-like shape that rises into a heart outline at the top. The wings are filled with black and white filigree scrollwork, and the body is shaded in lilac and grey with bold black outlines. The photo is taken straight on against a dark textured background, and a small red heart tattoo is partly visible at the bottom left.

Neo-trad Forearm Butterfly Heart Ribbon Filigree Scrollwork

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 down, the lot of you, and mind the pram. Right. This is about Mrs Okonedo on the ninth floor of Carrow House, who kept a lilac ribbon in a biscuit tin from the spring of the big flood. Nobody knew what it was for. It was long and soft and the colour of sweet peas, and on Sundays she tied it round her balcony railings so the pigeons had something pretty to look at.

Keep reading

One wet morning the wind got under it and took it straight out over the car park. It sailed up past the fourth floor and snagged on the iron scrollwork of the stair gate at the top of the block. The rain came on, and the ribbon folded itself the way wet things do, into a heart with its point gone soft. Then the sun broke through for about four minutes, the old railings threw their curls across it, and the whole thing lifted off as if it had only just remembered it had wings.

Now, I'm not saying it flew to the moon. It went round the block three times looking for the window it came from. It finally settled on the sill of the boy on the eleventh floor, stuck in bed with a bad chest and counting moths on the ceiling for a week. He pressed his nose to the glass and said, "That's not a moth." His gran said, "No, love. That's a butterfly that's been to the laundrette."

Mrs Okonedo came up the stairs that afternoon to fetch her ribbon. The boy opened the door, and they both stood there looking at it for a long time. She said she'd have it back. He said he'd keep it. They settled it the way people do round here, with two cups of tea and the biscuit tin on the table between them.