Colourful watercolour-style butterfly tattoo with black linework and dotted outlines on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly on the forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A butterfly in profile with outstretched wings, its body and antennae drawn in black linework. The wings are filled with soft blended washes of red, blue, yellow, green and purple, with loose splatter dots around the edges. The design is shown on smooth skin against a plain background with even lighting.

Forearm Butterfly Wing Watercolour Splatter Insect

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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

Dear Marguerite, the tin of paints you left behind in the potting shed has finally dried out, though I opened every lid anyway and found a cracked cake of cerulean still sitting in the corner like it was waiting for you. I took it to the back step on Tuesday and tried to remember how you used to load a brush, wet and then almost dry, so the colour bled rather than sat. It came out blue, then a smear of red where the tin had rusted, then a yellow that looked like the sun through a bottle.

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Mr Okafor from number nine came over the fence to ask what I was doing with the washing line strung across the garden. I told him I was painting moths, and he laughed and said I'd gone soft since the funeral, which is probably true. But I did get the wings right in the end. I pressed the wet paper together and lifted it off, and there were two halves that didn't match, one heavy with violet and one thin as breath, and I thought of you saying a wing should never be perfect or it wouldn't fly.

I've pinned the sheet above the kettle. Come round when the reunion post arrives and we can argue about whether the splatter was meant to look like rain or like something we shouldn't have said at the dance. Bring the good brushes if you still have them. The blue is still here, and I suspect it has been waiting for you longer than I have.