Realistic coloured tattoo of three butterflies, two red and one blue, trailing a shaded black swirling ribbon down the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three butterflies with swirling ribbon on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

Three butterflies sit along a shaded black ribbon that curls from a spiral at the top to a loop at the bottom. The top butterfly is red with black edging, the middle one is red and black with a striped pattern, and the bottom one is blue and white. The wings have soft, smooth shading that gives them a three-dimensional look, and the ribbon fades into the skin around them.

Realism Ribs Butterfly Swirl Ribbon Smoke Spiral

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

Dear Owen,

Keep reading

The smoke off the Glyn Colliery has been sitting on the valley all week, grey as wet flannel, and Mam says it will lift when the wind turns round. I have stopped believing her. Still, I went up the hill yesterday to see if you could make out the chapel roof from wherever the ship has got to, and a butterfly came out of the hedge and sat on my glove as if it had been waiting for me.

It was red, the colour of the lamp you carried down the shaft every morning, with black edges like the soot that never came out of your collar. I thought of the one Taid painted on the tin of tea when we were small, and how you said butterflies only lived where it was warm. I laughed at you then. I do not laugh now.

Mr Pryce from the office says the men will be on half shifts until the spring, so Dad sits at the table with his hands flat on the cloth and does not speak. The wireless is broken. The smoke rising from the stack curls up past the church and round again, and I swear it looks like the thing you drew on the back of the rent book, the spiral that never closed.

I have written your name on the flour sack for the postman. Come home when there is work, or send for me when there is not, and I will bring the blue one from the back gate. Tell me what colour the sea is.

Love, Nell