Colour tattoo of a pink and purple butterfly, purple lotus flowers and vines running from the ankle down the top of the foot, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterfly and lotus flowers on an ankle and foot

Botanical · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A bare foot and ankle show a colour tattoo of a butterfly with pink and purple wings above two purple lotus flowers, one with an orange and yellow centre. Thin vines with leaves and small purple bell-shaped flowers trail from the ankle down across the top of the foot towards the toes. The dark outlines and flat fills are clear and well defined, set against a pale tiled floor in natural light.

Botanical Ankle Butterfly Lotus Flower Vine Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, because the mere only gives this story up when the frogs go quiet, and they have gone quiet now. There was a butterfly called Peg who came late to the pond one summer, her wings chipped from the thorn hedge, her colours faded to the pink of a cut thumb. She found a lotus at the water's edge, old Mother Ninefold, who had already begun to fold her petals shut for the night.

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"Stay until I open at dawn," said the lotus, "and you'll have the best seat in the whole water." But Peg shook the dew from her feathers and said she had no time to sit still. She had promised the bell flowers on the bank that she would carry word of the pond down to them before the frost, and the bell flowers were climbing the wall by the gate, stretching thin green arms towards the lane.

Mother Ninefold thought about this for the length of a slow breath. Then she opened a little, just enough to show the gold heart she kept hidden under her petals. "Take this dust on your legs and drop it where the vines are thickest," she said. "In exchange, carry my name down to them. Tell them a lotus can keep a light lit even when the water is cold." Peg agreed, and the trade was made before the moon came up.

You can still see the vines today, creeping over the old wall and down the lane. When the wind comes off the mere, the small purple bells ring against the stone, and the keeper's grandson, who opens the gate each morning, always finds a few fallen petals on the step, as if someone had walked through in the night and kept on walking.