Small black and grey butterfly tattoo in fine line style on the wrist, with a braided gold bracelet worn beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small butterfly tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small butterfly with outstretched wings sits on the wrist, drawn in thin grey outlines with soft grey shading across the wings. The linework is delicate and the tattoo is shown in close view against natural skin, with a braided gold bracelet just below it. The background is softly blurred, with a pink jacket and dark hair at the edges of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Butterfly Wing

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

The drawing board at the back of Haddow's print shop still has a ring worn into it from forty years of teacups, and on the Monday you turned sixteen it became yours. Mr Haddow handed you a stub of pencil and a photograph of a painted lady, bent at the corners, and told you the parish fête poster needed a butterfly that looked like it might still fly off the page. You stood at the board with your tongue between your teeth for an hour before he came back from the Co-op and looked over your shoulder.

Keep reading

'Too heavy,' he said, and pushed a finger along the edge of one wing. 'Lighter. Let the paper do the work.' So you thinned the outline until it was almost nothing, then rubbed the graphite with a rag so the wings went grey at the edges and pale at the veins, the way light sits on a window that has been breathed on. Ellen from the telephone exchange came in to collect a parcel and stopped with her hand on the door.

'That's the one,' she said. 'That's Dad's fence in July, all of it.' She did not explain and you did not ask. Haddow only printed it in black because black was all the ink he had, and the fête committee was pleased enough, though it was the grey that people kept touching on the noticeboard by the chapel, as if they could brush the dust off it.

Years later a letter arrived asking whether the butterfly could be printed on cards for a wedding, and Haddow passed it across the counter without comment. You copied it again from memory, lighter this time, and when you looked up the rain had stopped and a real one was sitting on the sill outside, folding and unfolding in the sun as though it had been waiting to check your work.