Black and grey butterfly tattoo with fine line swirls and dots on the ankle, shaded wings against a pale blue background.

Butterfly and swirls on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded butterfly with dotted wing markings sits on the side of the ankle, with thin flowing lines trailing upward above it and curling down toward the heel. The wings use grey shading with black outlines, while the swirling trails are crisp single strokes. The photo is taken straight on against a pale blue sheet, with the foot partly in frame.

Fine line Ankle Butterfly Swirl Dot Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallowtail came out of the hay bale on the last Tuesday of February, when the frost had sat on the yard for nine days and Dad had stopped pretending the ewes would lamb early. It hung in the cold light of the feed store, wings half open, grey as the sacking it had been sleeping in. Gran always said a butterfly in February was a debt somebody had forgotten to pay.

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I carried it across to the kitchen in a jam jar with the lid pierced full of holes. Gran was at the table with her spectacles on the end of her nose, counting eggs into a bowl that had belonged to her mother. She didn't look up. She said the wings were dusted with the same silver as the frost on the bottom of the gate, and that if I breathed on them too hard I would rub the colour off like bloom off a plum.

We set it on the windowsill above the sink, where the sun came through at half past three. Within the hour the dots along its wing edges had caught the light, and the thin lines it trailed behind were the only straight things in the room, drawn across the glass like a hook pulled through water. Gran sent me out for the milk, and I went the long way by the track, following a line of fox prints in the snow that wound round the field in loops, the way a swirl does when it is drawn without lifting the pen.

When I got back the windowsill was empty. The jar sat with its lid off, and Gran was humming under her breath with one hand flat on the glass where the wings had been. She said it had gone on ahead to see whether spring remembered the way. I didn't tell her the fox prints led up the hill and never came down again.