A colourful watercolour-style butterfly tattoo with splashes of blue, pink and orange on the upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour butterfly on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A monarch-style butterfly with wings in green, orange, yellow and blue sits over the upper back, viewed from behind. Soft splashes of blue, pink, orange and red spread outwards from the wings, with fine speckled dots scattered around the edges. The ink is vivid and colour dominates the composition against the skin and a dark top.

Back Butterfly Splash Watercolour 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

Settle down now, and mind the cider, because this is the tale of the painter's girl at the Pier Ballroom, and it wants telling properly. Her name was Nell Haskett, and she came up from Margate in the summer of nineteen fifty-one with a paint box, a tin of turps and nothing else worth carrying. The manager let her sweep the floor for her keep. Nobody asked her to paint.

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Every night she swept the boards after the last waltz, and every night she watched the lights go down on the pale green walls. One night, when the sea fog came in thick enough to hide the pier lamps, she took a jam jar of blue, a jar of rust and a dish of marigold and flung them at the back wall. Not a picture, mind. Splashes, the way a wave slaps the groyne and sends spray over everything. Then she dipped her brush in green and began a monarch with wings like stained glass, and she painted it fast before the colour could think better of it.

Come the Saturday, the place was packed for the Harvest Hop, and the whole room stopped dancing when the lights came up. Old Mr Quarrie, who had run the hall since the war, stood in front of the wall with his hat in his hands and said nothing for a full minute. Then he took a pound note from his waistcoat and pressed it into Nell's palm, and that was the last wage anybody ever paid her, because she never swept another floor in that town.

Some say she caught the night train to Hull with her brush behind her ear. I say she never left, because the butterfly is still up there, and when the band plays the last waltz and the chandeliers dim, the splashes catch the light and look wet, as if they have only just dried.