Traditional style butterfly tattoo in bold blues, reds, oranges and greens with black outlines, placed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional butterfly on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with spread wings sits centrally on a pale forearm, with a black body, a dark circular marking on the thorax and thin black antennae. The wings use bold black outlines with blue, teal, red and orange fills, and dots and scalloped edges along the wing borders. The background shows a red plastic-wrapped surface and a wooden panel, which keeps the tattoo as the clear focus.

Traditional Forearm Butterfly Insect Wing Antennae

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 Dyers' Guild of Ashcombe had not produced a true blue in forty years, and the Lady Treasurer had stopped pretending otherwise. So when the summons came, you took the long stair down to the cellars with a pot of madder under one arm and no hope at all.

Keep reading

Old Orla kept the last of the blue in a glass case beneath the vats, pinned on black velvet: a butterfly the length of your thumb, its wings edged in scallops like a chapel window. 'The Vellmoor blue,' she said. 'It came from the hill meadows, where the swallowtails fed on bruise-flower. Nobody knows why it stopped.' You leaned close enough to see the dots at the wing tips, each ringed in orange, each placed by a hand that had hurried and did not care.

You spent three nights on the hill with a lamp and a net. On the third, a single wing lifted out of the dark grass, teal at the edge and red beneath, and settled on your sleeve as though it had been waiting for you to finish arguing with yourself. You did not catch it. You held your breath until the tax-men had gone back down the valley road, and then you let the bruise-flowers grow in the Guild's own garden.

In the spring the vats ran blue again. Orla hung your first bolt of cloth beside the glass case, and the velvet beneath it stayed empty, because nobody in Vellmoor wanted to pin a butterfly once they had seen one fly.