Realism-style pencil drawing of a woman's back and shoulder with a rose-grey pencil portrait and colourful butterflies across the shoulder blade, designed as a back tattoo.

Woman's back with butterflies and colour drips

Realism · Back · Mixed · Flash

A pencil drawing shows a woman seen from behind and in profile, with her hair in a loose bun and her face turned to the right. Multicoloured butterflies in pinks, greens, oranges, yellows and blues spread across her upper back and shoulder, with a few smaller butterflies drifting away from the main cluster. Soft shading and fine hatching give the hair and skin depth, while the butterflies have coloured-pencil detail, and thin watercolour-style drips fall from the wings on a plain white background.

Realism Back Shoulder Woman Hair bun Butterfly Back Shoulder Drip

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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

You find him at the bottom of the allotment at seven, before the dew has left the bean rows, a jam jar of watercolour balanced on an upturned bucket. He says the butterflies will not come to a garden that looks like a garden, so he has been painting the buddleia wrong on purpose, streaking the lilac heads with rose and ochre and letting the wet runs slide down the fence posts to dry in the sun.

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You think he is mad until the Painted Ladies arrive, three and then thirty, settling on the streaks as if the colour were nectar. They walk the drips with their tongues uncurled, lift their wings slowly, and carry the pinks and blues off along the hedge. By nine the fence looks like something that has been crying in the best possible way, and the lane is full of orange wings tipping away over the roofs.

Your mother rings to say the house is being sold. You stand among the stripes of paint and tell him. He doesn't look up. He is dipping a brush in the green and drawing a single line down the last post, slow and careful, the way you'd write a name on a letter you weren't yet ready to post.

Next spring the new owners find the fence still speckled, and a single blue wing caught in the knot of the wire, dry and perfect, lifting every time the wind comes off the hill.