Colour tattoo of a butterfly with pink, red, blue and purple washes and ink splatters, on the outer forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly is tattooed on the forearm, with its wings built from loose pink, red, blue and purple washes. Dark ink splatters and drips spread across the wings and around the edges, with soft blended areas instead of defined outlines. The butterfly fills most of the frame against a plain skin background.

Forearm Butterfly Wing

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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 painter's daughter, Orla, had been told a hundred times that a butterfly could not be caught by hand without losing the dust from its wings. She did not believe it, so one wet morning in the walled garden at Brackenmoor she tried. She crept along the rows of foxgloves where the mist still lay, past the bee skeps and the cracked stone bench, and reached out with both palms cupped together.

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The butterfly was not white or yellow like the others. Its wings were the colour of spilt wine going pale at the edges, with a bruise of violet near the body and a streak of sky blue that ran along the upper rim. When she closed her hands, a fine dust came away on her fingers and stained them rust and indigo. She looked at her palms for a long while, then opened them.

The butterfly did not fly away. It sat on the back of her wrist and let its wings open and close, slow as breath, while the ink-dark drips from her father's ink pots seemed to spatter out across the mossy wall behind her. She understood then what the old gardener had meant by a painted thing: it was never finished until someone was willing to be marked by it.

She went up to the house with the colour on her hands and told her father she had caught nothing at all.