Realistic black and grey tattoo of a woman's face behind a wire grid, with orange butterflies and a small pocket watch, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic woman's face with butterflies on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a large tattoo showing a woman's face with a dark, shadowed eye and lips, partly covered by a grid of wire or barbed lines. Soft shading and smooth gradients give the face a photographic, three-dimensional look against a black background. Two orange butterflies and a small pocket watch sit at the lower edge, and the bright orange is the only colour in an otherwise grey image.

Realism Calf Woman Face Butterfly Pocket watch Eye Lip

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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

Dear Mags, the rain has finally stopped on the north wall, so I can hear myself think, which is the only thing this castle is good for. The lamp keeps going out in the chapel, so I have moved my bench into the old solar where the wind comes through the broken window and carries orange butterflies in from the heather. They are the only colour left up here. Everything else has gone the grey of wet slate.

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Behind the wire screen in the great hall, the Vaughan family kept a portrait of Eleanor Vaughan, painted before the siege. Someone strung chicken wire across the frame to keep the swallows off, and over the years the wire rusted and bent, so now her face looks out through a net of little squares, one eye open, the other shadowed as if she has only half decided to watch us. I have been mending the pocket watch the steward left me, the one with the cracked crystal and the hands stuck at ten to four. I know you think I am being sentimental, but when I wound it this morning it ran for a full minute before it stopped again.

On the last night, I went to tell her the watch was going. The wind had torn the wire clear of one corner and a butterfly had got caught inside the grid, wings flat against her cheek, orange as a struck match. I freed it, and it lifted straight up past the rafters. I am writing to you because I did not tell the steward. I think the castle has been keeping time for her all this while, and I would rather not be the one to stop it.