Black tribal swirl butterfly wings with a teal awareness ribbon forming the body, tattooed on pale skin with freckles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal ribbon and swirl butterfly

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A butterfly tattoo with black outlined wings filled with curling tribal-style swirls. The body is a teal awareness ribbon, shaded to show a lighter highlight along its loop and darker edges, and the wing outlines taper into long trailing tails below. The design is centred on a close, straight-on view of the skin with plain light background.

Back Butterfly Awareness ribbon Swirl Tribal Wing

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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 dye never took the first time. Mrs Cowan blamed the damp off the pit heads, but I knew it was my impatience. I had boiled the indigo with a spoon of verdigris from the chemist in Ferryhill, and the cloth came out of the copper the colour of a kingfisher's back, all wrong for the sick-club sash. I kept the spoiled length under the sewing machine and took it out again on the Thursday after the accident at Shotton Drift, when the whole row was buying black crêpe from the draper and nobody wanted anything bright.

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Walter Pringle's girl came round for a yard of it to tie on the lamp-room door, and she asked me to put a butterfly on the end, the way the Sunday school had drawn them on the banners. I had no pattern. I cut the wings from a brown paper bag and went at them with black thread, curling the swirls the way my mother curled the ironing-board cover, round and round until the outline ran out of room and had to tail off into long points. It looked less like a butterfly than something that had flown into a web and made the best of it.

The men came up from the lamp room at first light, and the fellow at the head of the row, who had no faith in anything I stitched, held the teal end up against the window. He said the light came through it like the sea off Seaham. He asked for the sash off the door for himself, and I told him it wasn't finished.

I did finish it. I went up the back lane with the brown paper and a pot of ink and drew the wings again on the reverse, so the swirls would show whichever way it was hung. When I passed the lamp room that evening the door was shut and the ribbon was turning slowly on its nail in the draught, black side, then teal, then black again, as if it could not decide which way it wanted to face.