Colour tattoo of a purple butterfly with pink flowers and dotted vine linework on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and flowers on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Colour · Photo

A purple butterfly with black outlines sits above a trail of pink five-petalled flowers with yellow centres, linked by fine black vine lines with small dots. The shading is soft and the colours are bright and saturated, with the wings showing lighter highlights. The tattoo is set diagonally across the top of a bare foot against a dark, glossy surface.

Fine line Botanical Other Butterfly Flower Vine Foot

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has come in sideways across the car park since seven, and you have stacked the buckets of cut gerberas under the awning until the plastic sheeting sags like a wet sail. Nobody buys flowers in the rain, your uncle used to say, but nobody buys them in the sun either, not since the supermarket started selling them by the bunch at the door.

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A boy in a yellow cagoule stops at the stall and points at the one bucket you had kept back, the pink ones with the yellow eyes. He has two coins in his fist and a question about whether a butterfly would ever come to a flower that had already been cut. You tell him butterflies come to whatever is still open. He counts his coins twice, then buys three stems and goes off down the aisle holding them like a torch.

By the time the lamps come on along the stalls, the tarmac shines like black glass and the puddles hold the lights upside down. A purple butterfly comes in out of the wet and lands on the vine of ribbon you have looped along the front of the stall as a sign. It shakes the water from its wings, slowly, one and then the other, and walks the length of the ribbon as if checking each flower for something.

At closing you sell the last bunch to a woman who asks for nothing special, only that the stems be wrapped in newspaper. When you turn round the butterfly has settled on the edge of the scale pan, wings open and drying in the lamplight. You leave it there, and it is still sitting on the scale when you pull the shutters down.