Realistic colour butterfly tattoo in orange, red and yellow with black edging, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Orange butterfly on a shoulder blade

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with outspread wings sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The wings have black edging and bold orange, red and yellow fills, with pale highlights on the wing tips and fine antennae. Soft shading beneath the wings gives the butterfly a lifted, three-dimensional look against the skin.

Realism Back Butterfly Wing Antennae

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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

Before the shutters rolled up, Marta had the ovens going and the dough proofing under damp cloths. The orange glow from the firebox was the only colour in the room until the window began to grey. She was piping marigold icing onto the morning's sponges when the first butterfly settled on the rim of the cooling rack.

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It was no bigger than a thumbnail and the colour of the apricot jam she had spooned into the tarts an hour earlier. Its wings were edged in black like a burnt crust, and when it lifted, a faint shadow slid across the flour-dusted board beneath, as though it hung a little way above the world. Marta did not reach for it. Her grandmother had kept bees and used to say you should never pinch a thing that was only passing through.

It drifted to the proving bowl, then to the blackboard where the day's loaves were chalked up, and came to rest on the word SEEDED beside the rye. Marta watched it open and close its wings, slow as breathing. Outside, a delivery van ground past and the first lamps of the street flickered on.

When Dev came in at six, stamping snow from his boots, she told him there had been a visitor. He looked at the rack, the sponges, the empty board, and laughed. Then he noticed the chalk. The rye had been wiped away and rewritten in a neat hand: sold out by seven. Marta smiled, took up the piping bag, and for the first time in years did not check the recipe.