Traditional colour tattoo of a butterfly with orange flowers, dark leaves and the word MUM beneath it, on an arm.

Traditional butterfly with flowers on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly with pink, teal, orange and brown wings sits at the centre, flanked by orange five-petal flowers and dark green and teal leaves. The word MUM is written in small black capitals below the body. Bold black outlines and solid fills dominate, with some speckled shading on the wing edges.

Traditional Forearm Butterfly Flower Leaf Lettering

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 herring boats had been out three days when the wind dropped dead, and Tomas Vell found a butterfly resting on the tiller of the Gull Mary. Its wings were brown and rust with bands of teal and pink, and it opened and closed them slowly, as if it had been counting something. Nobody in the Scarrow fleet had ever seen a butterfly so far from land. Dougie Rees said it was bad luck. Tomas said it was lost, and he tied a strip of red wool to the gunwale so it had somewhere to perch.

Keep reading

Old Ena Porrit, who had mended nets on the quay for forty years, had once told him that butterflies were the ones who loved something enough to come back and look for it. Tomas had not believed her then. He believed her a little more when the storm came in the second night, the kind that took the Thessaly with all hands. The butterfly did not blow away. It settled on the bow lamp, orange and bright as a dropped coin, and whenever Tomas steered by it, the black water flattened in the lee of the cliffs.

They came in past the harbour wall at first light, every boat, every man. On the quay a crowd had gathered, and at the front stood Ena with her arms folded, scowling at the sea as though it owed her money. When the butterfly lifted off the lamp, it circled the mast once, then drifted over the wall and settled among the sea pinks by the steps.

It stayed there until the last net was hung to dry. Then it rose and went looking along the coast for someone else who had not yet come home.