Colour tattoo of two purple butterflies and pink cherry blossom branches across the top of a foot, with red painted toenails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and cherry blossom on a foot

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

Two purple butterflies with black outlines sit above a thin branch of pink cherry blossoms and buds that runs across the top of the foot toward the toes. The linework is bold and dark, with soft purple and pink shading that gives the wings and petals a gentle gradient. The photograph is taken on a white bed sheet, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Botanical Other Butterfly Cherry blossom Flower Branch Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blossom was already drooping when Dessa lifted it from the footwell of her brother's pickup, wrapped in wet newspaper and held together with a green hair tie. We were fifty miles past the last petrol station on the Coyote Flats road, and the thermometer on the dash had given up at forty-six. She said the branch came from a nursery outside Mercy Springs that had closed in the spring. I didn't ask her why she'd carried it so far. On that road you learn that people bring the things they can't leave behind, and you don't pry at the wrapping until they're ready.

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Two butterflies found us at the Hatch Wash turn-off. They were dark purple, with black edging on the wings, and they kept pace with the truck at about the height of the wing mirror, dipping and rising as though they were reading the road. Dessa laughed and said they'd followed her since the rest stop, which made no sense, because there was nothing out here for them to eat, not a flower or a cactus bloom for a hundred miles. When the truck finally coughed and died on the gravel, they settled on the open newspaper, one on each pink flower, as if the branch had been waiting for them all along.

We walked the last stretch to the dry channel where her mother had once tried to grow apricots. Dessa knelt in the sand and pressed the stem into the soft ground, packing it with both hands the way you'd settle a child into a bed. The butterflies lifted off, circled twice over the cutting, and then came down again on the topmost bud. I watched the purple wings close and open, close and open, and for a while neither of us said anything at all.

By the time the tow truck found us, the petals had gone the colour of the sunset behind it, and the butterflies were still there.