Watercolour-style butterflies in red, orange and pink on a woman's forearm, with a matching butterfly design sheet shown above on a white background.

Watercolour butterflies on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The upper part of the image shows a design of several watercolour-style butterflies in red, orange, peach and magenta, with soft edges and light splatters on a plain white background. The lower part is a photograph of a woman with dark hair, her hand raised to her head, and smaller butterflies of the same palette on her wrist and forearm. The wash-like shading and bright colour are the main features of the design.

Forearm Butterfly Wing

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 dyer at Haddon Mill had three vats and one rule, which was that nobody touched the blue. Her name was Agnes Carrow and she said it to the carters, the schoolmaster and the vicar's boy alike, so that by the summer of 1953 even the dogs knew to keep their noses out of the yard.

Keep reading

The butterflies came in the last week of July, when the foxgloves were out along the beck. They settled on the drying rails, a dozen at first and then more than anyone could count, and they drank from the puddles at the vat edges where the madder and the cochineal had soaked into the cobbles. Agnes chased them off with a wet broom. They came back. On the third evening she found the rails bare and the cloth on them striped with colour that had not been there at dinner time, rose and rust and a peach like the inside of a shell. Each wing had taken a little from the vats and left it wherever it landed.

Word went up the valley faster than the carrier's cart. Mrs Pell found her daughter's christening gown blushing magenta on the line. The men at the Crown swore an orange wing had settled on the bar and left a stain the shape of a hand. Agnes did not mind the lost work so much as the way the town began to watch her, as if she were the one who had sent them.

In September she stopped chasing them. She set out shallow dishes of leftover dye along the low stone wall at the bottom of the yard and went indoors. When the frost came the butterflies lifted off the wall in a loose, uneven cluster and went up over the moor towards the reservoir, their wings still catching the low sun. The stone kept the colour for years afterwards, and the children of Haddon Mill still ran their fingers along the streaks and called it the dyer's wall.