Orange and black monarch butterfly tattoo in a traditional style on the ankle of a foot wearing a printed shoe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Monarch butterfly tattoo on a foot

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A monarch butterfly is shown in side view with outstretched wings, outlined in bold black linework and filled with orange. Black dots mark the wing edges, and the orange areas have soft, even shading. The butterfly sits on the side of a foot against a dark background, with a patterned shoe and painted toenails in the frame.

Traditional Ankle Butterfly Monarch butterfly Foot Toenails

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, sit down, you're letting the cold in. The show was called Pellew's Marvels, and by that autumn the big top had more holes than canvas, the elephant had gone to a farm in Norfolk to be fed apples and pity, and nobody bought tickets any more. We played to the sheep.

Keep reading

Gussie Marr did the clown work, and Gussie had shoes the length of a canoe, cut from old cardboard and covered in comic pages his grandmother had glued down for him. Orange hair, black ink, all gone soft at the toes. One October morning he stood in the wet grass by the wagons, tipping his hat to nobody, when a monarch came over the hedge, rattled past his ear and settled on the curl of his left shoe, right above a cartoon duchess fainting in a puddle.

It was late for them. Every other butterfly that year had gone south weeks before, and the wind had turned round to the west. Gussie didn't move. He stood there with his arms out for the best part of an hour while the rest of us packed the lorry and swore at the generator. When it finally lifted, it went over the wagons heading the wrong way for anywhere a circus could go, and Gussie said, quite calmly, that it would make Mexico by Christmas if it was stubborn enough.

We closed that week. Gussie went into a home in Margate with the shoes under his bed. When they cleared his room, they found a folded page of the strip tucked inside the left one, and on the duchess's cheek a single black dot, pressed in with a pen, where the butterfly had been.