Butterfly Tattoo Designs and Ideas

Butterflies make colorful subjects for tattoos.

Butterfly tattoos are among the most popular and enduring images that people have inked on their bodies. Women choose them for their graceful forms and delicate beauty. But butterfly tattoos are not a strictly feminine iconography. The insects have been powerful symbols across cultures, with myths, legends and religious connotations attached to the fragile creatures and their luminous wings.

Beliefs

Butterfly mythology exists in most cultures and imbues the choice of a butterfly tattoo with added significance, intended or not. The Irish have a rich legend of a beautiful but cursed fairy named Etain who was changed into a butterfly by a jealous queen. The Greeks say that an emerging butterfly is a new soul. Native Americans believe that butterflies deliver dreams. The Aztecs and the Mayans honored butterflies as the souls of the dead, particularly those of soldiers killed in battle. In Asia, butterflies symbolize joy. And in every culture the butterfly is a stand-in for rebirth, for hope and for the power of transformation.

Celtic Knot and Tribal Butterflies

The Celtic knot butterfly is typically a black ink working of a butterfly form made of interwoven Celtic knots. The wings are open to display the careful symmetrical pattern. The lines may be delicate or heavily drawn. A tribal butterfly is made of the Maori-style thick stylized lines or may be created with thinner black outlines filled in with some colored high lights.

Fantasy Butterflies

Fantasy butterflies range from fairies with huge iridescent wings to winged pin-ups in old-style tattoo design. A scattering of delicate butterflies might be interwoven with flowering vines that wrap around an arm or a leg or over a shoulder. Small fantasy butterflies are commonly seen as ankle tattoos and, less often, on the back of the neck or on the wrist.

Realistic Butterflies

Full-color, full-size, entomologically-correct butterflies are the work of artists who use the body as a canvas. Blue morphos from the tropical rainforest and migrating orange monarchs are two of the more popular realistic butterfly tattoos. Several of the large, colorful swallowtail butterflies, with their enormous stained-glass and black velvet wings, also make dramatic body ink. A flight of butterflies filling a back or winging around the torso is a bold way to commemorate a life changing event or passage.

References

• Bullseye Tattoos: Butterfly tattoos, A Brief History
• Flickr: Monarch

Resources

• "Image and the Imagination in the American Tattoo"; Marina Kastan; 2008