Colourful butterfly tattoo with orange, yellow and teal wings and soft painted shading, placed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour-style butterfly on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A single butterfly with spread wings is shown in full, with dark outlines, fine veins and a thin antenna. The wings are filled with orange, yellow, teal and blue ink that blends softly, giving a painterly, watercolour-like effect. The butterfly sits centrally on a slightly out-of-focus area of skin, with dark background at the left and right edges.

Upper arm 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

Dear Tom, the scaffolding came down on Tuesday and the east window at St Aldred's is whole again, or as whole as a window gets after three winters in sacks. Mrs Ferrier wanted the lower panel left plain, but I found a box of old roundels in the vestry, and one of them was the exact teal of a kingfisher's back, so I set it where the saint's cloak used to be. You would have hated the fuss of it, all those little leads to solder by the light of a paraffin lamp.

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The butterfly came on the last afternoon. I had the ladder against the old keep wall, where the roof has gone to the weather, and I was packing my tools when it settled on the sill beside my hand. It was one of those orange ones with black veins running through the wings like the lead lines in a pane. When it opened them, the sun came through and the colours bled into each other, amber going to green going to a blue I couldn't name, the way glass does when you hold it to a lamp and forget you are meant to be working.

I didn't move for ages. Eventually it lifted off and went straight out through the gap where the ceiling used to be, up past the crenellations and over the moat, and I lost it against the grey. I thought about that the whole walk back to the van.

So I've left the spare roundel on the sill, uncemented, propped against the stone. If the wind takes it, that's fine. Somebody will find it in the spring and wonder how a blue like that got into a ruin. Write soon and tell me the trains are still running. Your brother, Ned.