Butterfly Tattoo Meaning: The Old Readings and the Recent Ones

Where the meaning comes from

A caterpillar wraps itself up, dissolves almost entirely inside the chrysalis, and comes out as something that can fly. Everybody who has ever watched it has built a meaning on it, and the meaning is nearly always the same one: change you came out of different.

That is the reading most butterfly tattoos are reaching for, and it needs no defending. What follows is about the other readings you will meet, which of them are old, which were made up for a list, and how the drawing changes with each.

The readings that are genuinely old

The soul. In ancient Greek one word, psyche, meant both the soul and the butterfly, and Aristotle used it for the insect. In Roman art the goddess Psyche is drawn with butterfly wings. A butterfly worn for the soul, your own or somebody else’s, is using the oldest reading there is.

A visit from someone who has died. This is the one that comes from home. The pamahiin is that a butterfly that comes into the house, lands near you or appears at a wake is a relative making a visit, and the older people in most families still say so when one does. A piece written up in Interaksyon collects the belief and the usual explanation for it, which is the same chrysalis picture: the body left behind, the spirit flying. A butterfly worn for a parent or a grandparent is carrying that, and it is one of very few tattoo meanings that a Filipino reader will recognise without being told.

The returning dead, in Mexico. Monarch butterflies arrive in the mountains of Michoacán each year around the start of November, and the Purépecha and Mazahua communities there have long read them as the souls of the dead coming home for the Day of the Dead. The monarch as a tattoo for someone lost has that behind it.

Marriage, in Japan. A pair of butterflies appears at Japanese weddings and in older decorative work as a wish for a happy marriage, and the butterfly as a soul turns up in Japanese ghost stories too. A matched pair worn by two people is using a real convention.

Love beyond death, in China. The story of the Butterfly Lovers, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, ends with the two of them rising from a grave as a pair of butterflies. It has been told for well over a thousand years, and a pair of butterflies in Chinese work usually means it.

The readings that were added recently

The colour chart. Blue for luck, yellow for happiness, purple for the mystical, black for death or a bad omen. You will find the chart on most lists and it does not come from anywhere. Colour in a tattoo is a drawing decision; choose it because you want it.

Three butterflies, or five, or a trail of them rising. No tradition assigns a meaning to the count. Three people, three stages, or a composition that climbs a spine better than one does are all good reasons, and they are yours.

The semicolon butterfly. The mark from Project Semicolon drawn as a butterfly’s body. It is a real meaning with a date behind it, and a recent one that grew out of the semicolon rather than out of the butterfly. The semicolon, and where it began is the page for it.

“The butterfly effect.” The phrase comes from the title of a 1972 talk by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz about small causes and large effects. As a tattoo reading, small choices mattering, it is about fifty years old, which makes it recent on this page and old enough to be yours.

Freedom. A fair reading of something with wings, and a modern one. Nothing wrong with it; just know that it was not handed down.

The lower back butterfly of the late 1990s. A placement and a moment rather than a meaning, and it has come back around. If that is what you want, the placement is comfortable and the drawing can be anything.

Butterfly or moth

The moth is often chosen as the butterfly’s darker sibling: drawn to light, tied to night, change that costs something. That reading is recent. The practical difference for a drawing is that moths rest with their wings flat and butterflies with them upright, moths have feathered or thick antennae where a butterfly’s end in a small club, and a moth’s body is heavier. If you want a moth, ask for one by name; a butterfly with the wings flat and the antennae wrong is the commonest mix.

Which butterfly, and why it matters for the drawing

A butterfly is one of the most symmetrical things you can put on skin, and symmetry shows every distortion when the body underneath it moves. It is also usually small and usually detailed, and those two pull against each other: fine veins and rows of dots sit very close together on a piece the width of a thumb, and close lines spread into one another over the years.

So the species is a design choice before it is a meaning. A monarch has bold dark veins and a border of white spots, and it holds its pattern well. A swallowtail adds tails to the lower wings and reads clearly even at a few centimetres. A morpho is all about one flat field of colour and is the one that argues for colour ink. A single-line butterfly, one unbroken stroke, carries the shape and none of the detail, and it ages best of all at a small size.

The butterfly designs show the range at the sizes they would be tattooed, and fine line, and how it ages is the honest account of what thin lines do over ten years.

How to choose which reading is yours

Say it out loud before it goes on. If what comes out is the chrysalis and why that change was yours, or the name of the person the butterfly is for, the tattoo is doing its job. If what comes out is a line from a colour chart, take another week.

If it is for someone who has died, the Filipino reading above is the one that will be understood here without a word, which is a rare thing for a symbol to offer.

What it is like to sit for one

Small butterflies go on the wrist, the ankle, behind the ear, the back of the hand, the collarbone and the shoulder blade, and most of those are short sittings near the easy end of the pain chart. The back of the hand and the top of the foot are the exceptions and run sharper. A larger piece, a monarch across a forearm or a pair down the spine, has room for the detail to keep its edges and will take longer.

One small piece of advice that comes up every time: if you want it small, ask for a simpler drawing than the one you fell for. The monarch with every vein will look like a monarch at ten centimetres and like a moth at three.