Black and grey tattoo of three butterflies, stars and swirling lines across an ankle and the top of a foot.

Butterflies and stars on an ankle and foot

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows three butterflies of different sizes, one on the ankle and two on the top of the foot, linked by swirling lines and outlined five-pointed stars. The butterflies are shaded in dark grey with soft highlights on the wings, while the stars and swirls are lighter, sketched lines. The black and grey ink sits on a bare foot against a dark textured towel, which keeps the focus on the design.

Ankle Butterfly Star Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The solar at Harrowgate had no roof left over the west end, so the stars came down into it every night for six hundred years. My uncle sent me up the tower with a bucket of lime and a stiff brush and told me to make the crumbling plaster decent before the county surveyor came in June. Mostly I kept looking up.

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On the third morning I found a ledge in the embrasure where the stone had been worn smooth by hands. Someone had laid out a scatter of wings there, grey and brittle as old pressed flowers, the big ones at the edge and the small ones tucked in close. Between them, scratched into the mortar with what must have been a nail, were five-pointed stars, and curling lines ran from one star to the next as if the wind had tried to write a word and given up halfway.

Mrs Pell, who did the brass in the chapel, said the lady of the house used to climb up every evening to watch the moths rise off the moat. She never came down before the first star showed. "She counted them," Mrs Pell told me, wiping her hands on her apron. "Three stars and she'd go. Every night, three." I asked what happened if there were only two out. Mrs Pell looked at me as though I'd asked something rude and said she'd never known it to happen.

That evening I sat on the ledge with the lime drying on my knuckles and waited. I counted the stars coming through the gap in the roof, one, two, three. Then I went down the spiral stairs in the dark and left the wings exactly where they were, and in the morning I plastered over everything except the stars.