Two realistic orange, black and teal butterfly tattoos, one on the back of each hand, with a partly visible traditional flower tattoo at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies on the backs of both hands

Realism · Hand · Colour · Photo

A pair of mirrored butterfly wings is tattooed across the backs of both hands, with the bodies and antennae extending up towards the wrists. The wings use shaded orange, black, yellow and teal ink with fine detail in the veins and scalloped edges, giving a lifelike, three-dimensional finish. A partly visible flower tattoo in bold outlines and warm colours sits at the top left, and the background is dark.

Realism Hand Butterfly Wing Hand Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The nettles at the bottom of Mrs Okonedo's allotment have been left standing since March, because she says the caterpillars are not yours to move. You kneel among them in your gloves and count the clusters of eggs on the undersides of the leaves, pale as sugar grains, and you think about how your father would have had the whole bed scythed by now.

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By June the nettle bed is loud with them. Black spiky caterpillars knit the stems together with silk, and you learn to shake a leaf gently to see who is hiding inside. Mrs Okonedo sits on an upturned crate with a flask of tea and a notebook, writing down dates in a hand as neat as a bank clerk's. She says the small tortoiseshell has a trick: it sleeps out the winter in a woodshed or a loft, then wakes on the first warm day and goes looking for the flowers it remembers.

One afternoon in August a butterfly settles on the back of your glove while you are weeding. Its wings are the colour of marmalade, edged with a row of blue scallops, and it sits there opening and closing like a slow pulse. You do not move. Mrs Okonedo says, without looking up, that it is tasting you, checking whether the ground around you is worth laying eggs in come spring.

When you finally lift your arm it flies, wobbling in a line over the fence towards the railway cutting. Mrs Okonedo turns a page. You write the date beneath hers, in your own careless hand, and go home without cutting a single stem.