Colour tattoo of a blue butterfly above a yellow and black swallowtail butterfly, framed by grey and white swirls, on the upper back.

Two butterflies and swirls on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

Two butterflies are tattooed on skin, a blue butterfly with grey-edged wings above a yellow and black swallowtail with blue-edged hindwings. Soft grey and white swirling flourishes with smooth shading surround and link the two insects. The colour is vivid in the wings and the shading is soft and blended across the swirls, with the composition running vertically down the back.

Back Butterfly Swirl 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

Sit nearer the grate, the pair of you, and mind the cat, she's had her eye on your ankles since supper. Now. You'll not have heard about the summer the Halloran sisters ran the boarding house on Gull Terrace, the year the swallowtails came in off the marsh like a pack of yellow letters blown out of a postman's sack.

Keep reading

Mrs Halloran kept a blue glass jar on the windowsill of room six. Nobody lodged in six that summer, not after the Dutch painter went out on the ebb and came back with his coat full of sand and no memory of his own name. Still, the jar stayed, and every morning there was a butterfly inside it, a blue one, big as a dinner plate, its wings pale at the edges like a sky that's forgotten its own weather.

Agnes, the younger girl, swore she'd let it out. She stood on the stool with the sash up and the wind dragging the curtains like sails, and the blue thing lifted, circled the chimney pot, and went straight for the swallowtail that had been clinging to the drainpipe all week, yellow as lemon peel and twice as bitter. The two of them spun up through the spray, round and round, trailing their long tails like ribbons on a maypole, until the gulls gave up and the tide turned.

Next morning the jar was empty and the sill was dusted with something silver. Agnes never said a word about it. But if you walk the back shore at low water you'll find the sand swirled in curls, the way water leaves it, and in July, when the wind's from the west, you'll see the pair of them rising off the dunes, looking for the room they came from.