Colourful butterfly tattoo with a loose, painted watercolour look on the forearm, with a small solid black circle tattoo near the wrist.

Painted-style butterfly on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A butterfly with outstretched wings is the main subject, shaded in pink, red, teal, blue and purple with soft blends and loose splashes of colour. Dark ink spatters trail down from the wings toward a small black outlined circle with a solid black shape inside, placed near the wrist. The photograph is taken straight on against a plain cream wall, with the colour work filling the upper forearm.

Forearm Butterfly Splashes Circle Heart

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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

On Scarra the wind came in from the west every morning of the year, and the old dyer Morag Keir kept her vats behind the church because the fumes did not bother the gulls. Her grandson Ewan, eleven and useless with wool, spent his summers carrying buckets of madder and woad down the shingle path.

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One June a butterfly came off the heather and settled on the rim of the indigo vat, its wings opening and closing as if it were thinking. Morag said it was a soul come back to look at the work. Ewan said it was hungry. He dipped a finger in the blue and held it out, and the butterfly walked onto his knuckle and drank. When it lifted, its wings were streaked with rose and teal where it had brushed the madder.

All that week the creature came back, and each time it wore more colour, until the ferryman swore he had seen a moth the size of a sail going over the Sound. Morag grew frightened, because a dyer who makes a thing too bright will be asked to pay for it. She took the black pot she used for lettering the boat names, drew a ring on a flat stone, and inside the ring she painted a heart she had copied from the church door. "Let it go back to the heather," she said, "and let the ink be what it leaves behind."

Ewan carried the stone to the cliff and set it on the grass. The butterfly rose out of the rocks, circled the ring once, and when it flew east the dark specks of ink went with it like sparks off a fire, falling on the wet stones all the way down to the water. Morag never sold another blue thread. Ewan says the colours were all in the wings and the ink was the price, and nobody on Scarra argues with him.