Black and grey butterfly tattoo with swirling vines and small leaves across the top of a foot, with soft shading on the wings.

Butterfly and vine tattoo on a foot

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly with shaded wings sits on the top of a foot, with thin curling vine stems and small leaves extending out on both sides. The outlines are fine and dark, while the wings and leaves use soft grey shading to show depth. The image is in black and grey, with the foot filling most of the frame against a wooden floor and a dark plastic sheet.

Botanical Other Butterfly Vine Leaves Swirl Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Lyric has run out of quicksteps by half ten, so Sid Harker eases them into a waltz, and you stand by the cloakroom with one shoe in your hand because the heel came away on the stairs. Mavis says to go on regardless, nobody looks down in a ballroom, and she is right. Everyone is looking across the floor, where Ivy Pell is waiting for a partner who isn't coming.

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Ivy has the straightest back in Margate and a strip of green crepe paper looped along the balcony rail behind her, left over from the Coronation dance. Someone has pinned a cut-paper butterfly to the vine, its wings gone soft with damp. Each time the doors swing open the air shivers and the paper lifts, and Ivy's chin lifts with it, then drops again.

You know that look because you have worn it yourself, the look of a woman who has counted the same six steps in her head for an hour. So you hop across, shoe still in hand, and offer her your arm. She laughs and says you'll tread on her, and you say you've only got one shoe on, which makes you the safer bet. Sid hears this and lets the waltz run a bar longer than it needs to.

You dance badly. She steers you round the lamp-lit edge while the paper vine trembles above, and when the record ends she presses something into your palm: a pencil drawing of the butterfly on the back of a bus ticket, its wings shaded with the side of the lead. Keep it, she says, I'm only any good at the one that stays put.