Colour realism tattoo of red, orange and purple flowers with a blue butterfly and an orange butterfly across an upper arm sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic flower sleeve with butterflies

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo covers the arm in a full sleeve of large flowers, mainly red and orange dahlia-like blooms with purple blossoms and dark green foliage behind them. A blue butterfly sits at the lower edge and a smaller orange and brown butterfly sits near the top, both with soft, detailed shading. Smooth gradients, bright saturated colour and a dark background give the piece a three-dimensional, photographic finish.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Flower Dahlia Butterfly Leaves Petal

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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

The dahlias came up from the tubers my father lifted in October, forty years of them, each one labelled in his square capitals on brown paper gone soft as cloth. By August the bed beside the Bramley rows was a riot of red and orange heads, taller than the children who came to gather windfalls, and the wasps had given up on the plums to drink from them instead.

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Ruth from the next smallholding said I should sell them at the gate for a pound a stem. I said I'd sell them when she could tell a Bishop of Llandaff from a Café au Lait. She couldn't, and that was the end of that. What I didn't tell her was that the blue butterfly came every afternoon at four, down from the old walnut, and settled on the bench by the hives as if it had an appointment.

On the last Saturday of the month a man in a green waxed jacket knocked at the orchard gate asking the way to a chapel that had been pulled down before he was born. He stayed for tea. He stood among the dahlias with his hands in his pockets and said the colours looked wet, as if somebody had painted them a minute ago. I told him it was the trick of late light. He said no, it was the trick of looking properly, and I didn't know what to do with that.

When he had gone I cut the biggest red head, the one my father always said was showing off, and stood it in a jam jar on the windowsill. The butterfly came down to the stem and stayed until dusk, opening and closing its wings as though it was deciding something. I left the gate unlatched that night.