Colourful butterfly tattoo with orange, blue and purple wings and bold black outlines, placed on the chest in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Orange and blue butterfly on chest

Neo-trad · Chest · Colour · Photo

A large butterfly with spread wings fills the frame, with a slender black body and two curved antennae. The wings use bold black outlines with orange, yellow, purple and turquoise blue fills, shaded to create depth and a slightly glossy look. The design is centred on a warm, lightly toned skin background, with the wing edges and scalloped borders giving the composition a symmetrical balance.

Neo-trad Chest Butterfly Wing Antennae Insect

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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

At half past three the corridor lights on Ward Nine drop to their night setting, and you find the butterfly on the lino outside bay four, one wing folded like a page someone meant to read again. Under the strip lights its orange has gone the colour of weak tea, but the blue along its edges is the only thing in the building that looks as if it has been somewhere else.

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Dee comes past with a linen trolley and says it has probably come in on a visitor's coat, they always do, and asks whether you are going to squash it or sign for it. You fold a sheet of drug-chart paper into a cup, slide it under the wings, and the butterfly climbs onto your palm with the patience of something that has done this before. Its feet are cold pins against your skin.

The fire door at the end of the corridor sticks, as it always does, and you put your shoulder into it. Outside, the car park is orange under the sodium lamps, and beyond the railings the wind is shoving the bins about. You open your hand on the window ledge. For a long second nothing happens, and you think, that's it, the one thing on nights that asked for nothing.

Then the wings lift, slowly, and the butterfly rises past the lamp and over the roof towards the ward, where a single light is still on above a bed in bay four. You follow it until the brick takes it, then you go back in, wash your hands, and finish the obs.