Temporary Butterfly Tattoos, But Which One?

These brightly colored temporary butterfly tattoos or motifs tend to be on the smallish side and are often placed on the lower stomach to one side, on the upper arm, shoulder or upper back of women. Larger butterfly tattoos are often placed on the lower back region. The ladies amongst you certainly favor the butterfly tat over anything else. In fact they are the second most popular tattoo after the tribal tattoo, no mean feat!

Drew Barrymore, Lita Ford, Sung Hilee, Kelis, Jo O'Meara, Julia Roberts, Britney Spears, Sara Spraker, Rachel Stevens, Krissy Taylor, Denise Van Outen, Anne Wagner are amongst a large number of celebrities sporting butterfly tats. These are all permanent tattoos of course (as far as we can tell) as opposed to the temporary butterfly tattoos we recommend on this site, but it's interesting to see how popular they are.

As I say, many temporary butterfly tattoos are quite small in size, some barely bigger than a stamp. Hey! Let yourself go and get a bigger one and make an impact! I hate those little ones that are a token gesture consisting of an outline and a couple of coloured blobs.

What I don't understand though is why most butterfly tattoos are just stylized versions of butterflies. By that I mean they are not copies of real butterflies, but just a representation.

Nature provides some of the most interesting and colorful creatures around with many varied colors and patterns! What do we do? We try to get clever and improve on it by making up our own patterns and colors. That's a bit wierd for me. I mean you see tattoos of a rose, a dolphin or even a tiger. Are these in physchedelic colors? Does the tiger have blue and red stripes? Is the dolphin yellow?

So why do most temporary butterfly tattoos have imaginary colors and patterns? Beats me. Ah well, personal opinion of course and time for me to get off this soapbox, but judge for yourself pictures of tattoos of real butterflies.

Talking of tigers earlier, one interesting development is the tiger butterfly tattoo. It generally shows a tiger face on the butterflies wings, the eyes and stripes of the tiger appearing as though they are the markings of the butterfly wings. This seems to be quite popular as I've seen a number of them around.

OK, OK, I will admit there IS a stylized version of temporary butterfly tattoo that I quite like. It's the celtic butterfly or the tribal butterfly. These aren't pretending to be butterflies, and are usually quite simple in look and color. But they have quite an impact and can look quite beautiful if you get the right one.

Check out our articles for more information on other temporary tattoos.