Neo-traditional tattoo of bright butterflies and pink cherry blossoms running down a lower leg, with a flip-flop visible at the ankle.

Butterflies and blossoms down a lower leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

Several butterflies with bold black outlines and bands of turquoise, yellow, orange and red sit among pink and red five-petalled blossoms, with a few loose petals scattered across the skin. The linework is heavy and the colour is solid and saturated, with minimal shading, and the design wraps from the upper calf down towards the ankle. The leg is photographed outdoors against a pale grey background.

Neo-trad Calf Butterfly Flower Cherry blossom Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first butterfly came off the fishmonger's wall on a Tuesday in April, and by the Friday there were eleven of them, each banded in turquoise and yellow and a red that looked wet. Mr Hollis swore at them with his broom. Nobody in Thornbury Lane had painted anything on that wall since the coronation.

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Dorothy Ames, who kept the post office and knew everything that moved, said they were following the blossom. The cherry tree behind the chapel had dropped its petals across the road and over the bridge, pink and five-petalled, and the butterflies went from one to the next like someone reading a letter aloud. Her grandson Terry chased them with a jam jar and came home with nothing but yellow dust on his palms.

On the Saturday the wind turned round and the butterflies went up the lane towards the church, low over the wet cobbles, and the petals lifted from the gutters to go with them in a slow pale line. Terry walked behind with his empty jar. At the lych gate they settled on the wall, wings opening and closing like something breathing, and the petals came down around them as if someone had asked for it.

Nobody could say who had asked. The vicar's wife remembered a girl who had sat on that wall one summer with a paintbox and never come back for it. By morning the butterflies were gone, the petals swept into the drain, and on the fishmonger's shutter someone had painted a single small blue wing, still wet at the edges.