Traditional style butterfly tattoo in red and black with bold outlines and small white dots on the wings, placed on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red and black butterfly on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large butterfly is shown with its wings spread symmetrically across the forearm, with long thin antennae rising above the body. The wings have bold black outlines, solid red fills with pale highlights, and black sections marked with small white dots and orange-tinged eyespots. The background is a black leather surface, and the image is shot straight on.

Traditional Forearm Butterfly Wing Insect 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

You climb the north stair of Hollin Keep because the carter's boy swore nothing grows inside its walls but nettles and jackdaws. The treads have lost their edges, and the ivy has done what ivy does to stone, prising it apart one patient season at a time. At the top there is no roof, only a square of white sky and a single red thing hanging above the broken hearth, opening and closing like a page being turned.

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It is a butterfly, larger than any you have seen in the valley. Its black wings are edged with a ridge of lace-fine veins and freckled with pale dots like frost on slate, and two rings the colour of old copper watch you from the upper corners. When you lift your hand it does not flutter off. It settles on the cold rim of the hearth, and the eyespots turn towards you as though counting. Your grandmother once said the lord who built this place kept a red ledger of every creature that passed through his gate, and that he never let one leave unrecorded.

You find the ledger under a fallen lintel, its boards swollen with damp. Inside, in brown ink, is a drawing of this very butterfly, and beneath it a line: Borrowed, not kept. Return before the wind turns. You look up. The sky has gone the grey of pewter, and the wind is coming round off the moor. The butterfly lifts, circles your head once, and slips through the gap where the sun used to be.

You carry the ledger down the stair with the wind at your back. At the foot of the steps, caught on the buckle of your satchel, there is a single red scale, bright as a coal and still warm from the hearth.