Realism style colour tattoo of a blue butterfly with shaded wings on the top of a foot, above a dark flat shoe.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue butterfly on the top of a foot

Realism · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A large blue butterfly is tattooed across the top of a foot, with its wings angled outwards and its body and antennae visible near the ankle. The wings use shaded blue tones with dark outlines and fine vein detail, and the body has gold and brown highlights. The background is a dark shoe and a patterned surface, which keeps the tattoo as the clear focus.

Realism Ankle Butterfly Wing Antennae Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bees had gone quiet in the Hollin orchard by the time Mags Tolley found the blue moth caught in the press-cloth. It was not a moth, her grandmother said, when she carried it up the lane in a cupped apron. Moths were brown and clumsy and came to lamps. This one had wings the colour of the sky after rain, edged in black like the lead on a church window, and it did not struggle when she held it.

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The old tale said that a blue butterfly in late summer carried a promise from the apple trees to the hills, and whoever let it go first would be owed a season's fruit. Mags had heard it a hundred times from her grandmother and never believed a word. Still, she walked to the top field, where the Bramleys hung heavy and the wasps were already drunk on windfalls, and opened her hands.

The butterfly did not leave at once. It sat on her knuckle, folding and unfolding, and she saw the gold at its body glint like the brass tap on the cider vat. Then it lifted, low over the grass, and dropped into the shade of the wall where her father had buried a jar of coins the winter he went to sea.

She dug with her fingers. The jar was there, green with damp, and beneath it a folded note in his square hand: the trees keep the good cider for whoever comes back to pick. She laughed, then cried, and the butterfly came back to settle on the lid, its wings opening slowly in the last of the sun.