Black and grey butterfly, lily and swirling vine tattoo across the top of a foot, shaded in a realistic style.

Butterfly and lily on the top of a foot

Realism · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly with patterned wings and a large lily-style flower are shown on the top of a foot, linked by fine swirling vines and curled tendrils. The butterfly and flower are shaded with soft greys and highlights, while the vines and leaf outlines are drawn in thin black lines. The foot is photographed from above on a dark textured towel, with the tattoo filling the upper half of the frame and the toes at the bottom.

Realism Botanical Fine line Ankle Other Butterfly Lily Flower Vine Swirl Leaf Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara Teague had the nets half mended when the first butterfly came off the water, pale as a bleached sail, and settled on the rail of the Tern. Nobody in Porthallow had seen one this far out. Her grandmother said they came only before a drowning or a wedding, and since the Pascoe boy was to marry at Michaelmas, Mara decided it meant the wedding and went back to her knotting.

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The butterfly did not leave. It walked along the tarred rope, opened and closed its wings, then lifted towards the cliff path where the wild lilies grew in the bracken. Mara followed it up the worn steps past the chapel and the gorse, her fingers sticky with pitch, until she found the lilies nodding in a hollow, dark as wet slate and streaked with silver where the sun caught them.

A vine ran from the flowers down the slope, curling itself into tight spirals around every stone, as if it were counting them. Where it ended, under a ledge, lay a tin box with a rusted clasp. Inside was a folded chart of the bay with a small cross marked where her father's boat had gone down in the March gale, and a lily pressed flat between the pages, still soft at the petals.

She sat with the chart on her knees until the tide turned below. Then she walked down to the harbour and found the Pascoe boy mending his own nets. She told him the butterfly had come, and that the sea had its tithe already, and that he should go to the chapel and ask the old women what they meant by it. He looked at her face, then at the sky over the cliff, and set his needle down.