Black and grey tattoo of skull-winged butterflies with faded smaller butterflies across the upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull and butterfly tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two large skull-winged butterflies sit in the centre of the image, with a third, smaller one above and to the right. Smaller faded butterflies and soft shadowed trails surround them on the upper back. The work uses black and grey shading with bold outlines, and the skulls are rendered with highlights and soft gradients.

Back Skull Butterfly

Find an artist for this

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

Right, sit down, the lift's out again so you've got time. Up on the fourteenth floor of Brackley House lived a woman called Maureen Tench, who kept her windows open all summer because she'd rather have moths in the kitchen than stale air. Nobody argued with Maureen. She had a way of tilting her head at you until you felt you'd said something daft.

Keep reading

The trouble started the August the council painted the stairwells. Under the grey gloss the lads from the estate uncovered a mural nobody remembered, a row of butterflies with wings like an old naturalist's drawings, and in the middle of each wing a small skull, bone-white and grinning. Maureen said the flats were drawing out whatever they'd swallowed over the years. The kids took it as a dare. They'd climb the stairs on a Friday and touch the wings for luck.

Then the moths began going missing from the bulbs and turning up on the landings in threes, dusty and dead, their wings laid out flat as if someone had combed them. Maureen gathered them into a biscuit tin with a Scottish terrier on the lid. On the last night of that summer she carried the tin out onto the balcony and opened it, and the moths lifted out, skull-winged, and went down the stairwell in a loose spiral like smoke finding a chimney.

Nobody saw where they went. But next morning the stairwell paint was clean, and Maureen was sitting on her step with the empty tin in her lap and one grey wing stuck to her thumb. She blew it off gently and watched it drift down past the railings, slow as a dropped letter, until the wind off the car park caught it and it was gone.