At First I Thought I Was Looking At A Number Of Coloured Ribbons,

but these are not man made,

 they are in fact the scales that make up butterfly wings,

painstakingly photographed by photographer Linden Gledhill, he is in fact a biochemist by training, to see more of these beautiful images have a look here, 


as an aside you may think that to take images like this you just put a butterfly wing under a microscope and take a picture, if only it were that easy, because of the way lenses work only a part of the picture will be in focus, so Linden takes multiple pictures and then combines them to form one in focus image, I looked at a YouTube clip of him doing just that, if you want to see how it is done have a look here, what an amazing unseen by most of us world can be found, if only you have the time to look.