Small fine line butterfly tattoo in black and grey on the upper back near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small butterfly near the shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly with two pairs of outlined wings sits on the upper back, close to the shoulder. The thin, even linework is in muted grey-brown ink with little or no shading, and the tattoo fills only a small part of the frame. Soft light falls across smooth skin, with lilac-toned hair visible at the top edge.

Fine line Shoulder Butterfly Insect

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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 cardboard tray had come off the back of the dodgem van with the rest of the stock, and Nell Marsh spent the first hour of the Ashford fair picking grit from the wings of the specimens before the rain got to them. Her uncle had collected them himself in the years before the war: swallowtails from the chalk downs, peacocks off the nettle beds behind the chapel, a camberwell beauty he swore he had netted in a churchyard. Now they sat under a sheet of glass on a trestle beside the candy floss, and children pressed their noses to it while their mothers counted coins.

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The trouble was the small brown one. Nobody had pinned it. It had come in the lining of the tray, folded tight, and when Nell lifted the glass to look, its two pairs of wings opened slowly, the way a thing does when it has decided to stay alive a little longer.

She did not tell her uncle, who would only have asked her to sell it at half price. Instead she carried the tray to the far end of the field, past the big wheel and the tent where a man swallowed fire, and set it on the grass by the hedge. The wind lifted the butterfly in one unhurried loop. It rose over the caravans and the lit-up dodgems and was gone above the poplars before the first drops fell.

When she walked back, the stall had sold out of everything but the empty case. Her uncle sat on a crate with his hat in his lap, counting the takings twice, and he did not ask where the small brown one had gone.