Colour tattoo of a butterfly with blue and pink swirled wings and black outline, on the forearm.

Swirl butterfly on the forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stylised butterfly with spiralled wings and a long curling tail fills most of the frame. The bold black outline is softened by blue and pink shading that fades inwards across the wings. The design sits centrally on a flat section of skin against a dark background.

Forearm Butterfly Swirl Wing Spiral

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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 well at Hollin Cross had been dry since the spring the miller's boy went up into the beech wood after the lost goat and did not come down. His mother still set a bowl of barley milk on the step each evening, and each morning it was empty, though no animal had been near the door.

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Old Ada from the far cottage said the wood was keeping what the village had forgotten to pay it. She said the wood liked a thing given with the right hand and turned three times before it was let go. So on the first night of the new moon, Tamsin Reeve took her grandfather's silver thimble, wound a length of blue thread around it, and walked to the edge of the trees where the bracken stopped and the moss began to curl up like the ends of a ribbon.

She turned three times. Her thimble dropped into the leaves, and when she bent for it there was a pale shape on the bark of the nearest beech, a butterfly drawn in lines of soot and river water, its wings spiralling inward until they became small knots of pink and blue. Its tail unwound down the trunk and into the roots. The boy's voice came from somewhere past the tail, asking whether the goat had gone home yet.

Tamsin told him it had. She went back down the path without looking round, and the well at Hollin Cross filled by morning, though nobody in the village could say who had carried the water up.